Without compromising the positions of any stakeholders or the credibility of the process, a way must be found to fast-track a good logistical future for South Africa’s very important manganese mining industry.

Needed is a very clear position that is bankable and then South Africa Incorporated must move forward – and do so very fast to avoid losing out to its nimbler global manganese competitors.

Reducing logistics costs is an absolute must. It doesn’t make sense for any country with such a valuable manganese endowment to be rendered uncompetitive by State-operated logistics.

State-owned Transnet and the State-run Department of Transport (DoT) must look at the issues very carefully because unless manganese mining makes the necessary structural changes to ensure that the next phase of investment can stay close to what it has been in the past, South Africa is, without doubt, heading towards a cul-de-sac – and as the window of opportunity closes, nobody will know where to go next.

What must be top of mind is giving the people of South Africa the best return.

While Kalahari has a wonderful manganese endowment, its 1 000 km distance from any port turns South Africa’s manganese mining into a mining-plus-logistics business, with the mining in private hands and the logistics in generally much slower public hands.

As things stand, manganese mining won’t always be of the lower-cost opencast variety; investment decisions about going underground at higher cost will have to be taken progressively from now on.

With logistics already making up a third of the cost of manganese mining, the private sector is intent on collaborating with the public sector to ensure that those costs are slashed.

While people will probably still buy South African manganese even if our competitors overtake us, an evacuation network as costly as the existing one will result in money to fund even future stay-in-business growth becoming increasingly scarce and greenfield growth will be shelved.

Currently, there are two transport corridors, one to Saldanha and the other to Gqeberha.

The Saldanha corridor is a good one, despite having port constraints that must be sorted out. Why this corridor is a good bulk- commodity transport route is because very little else travels along it.

But considerably more complicated is the rail line to Gqeberha, which is a multi-freight line with passenger and automotive connections at different points. The manganese ore is also made to wend its way through a four-terminal port complex that pushes up costs.

Several manganese mining companies tell Engineering News & Mining Weekly that the way to go is for 12-million tonnes a year to go down the Saldanha line, and a matching 12-million tonnes to go through Gqeberha – and not the current 16 t to Gqeberha and 8 t to Saldanha.

Fortunately, a lot of research is available for the DoT and Transnet to use for the good of South Africa’s economy.

Below are the responses of manganese majors.

Will South Africa’s ore advantage translate into longterm competitiveness?

South Africa holds one of the world’s most substantial manganese ore resource endowments. Yet the limits confronting the sector today are increasingly defined not by what lies underground, but by what happens above it.

The country remains one of the world’s most important sources of manganese ore, with the Kalahari Basin estimated to hold between 75% and 80% of global geological resources. This has supported decades of mining activity and export earnings. However, this natural advantage is under growing pressure for reasons largely unrelated to resource scarcity.

The central challenge is whether manganese ore can be moved to global markets competitively and reliably, year after year, in an increasingly contested global environment. Competing jurisdictions are not standing still. They are investing aggressively in infrastructure and logistics systems that lower costs, improve reliability, and attract capital. South Africa’s success will depend less on the size of its orebody, and more on the effectiveness of the systems built around it. The threat of the diminishing competitiveness of South African manganese ore exports is the key concern that has been expressed by the producers Engineering News & Mining Weekly spoke to.

What are the risks of the full economic value of South Africa’s manganese ore not being realised?

The fundamental question facing the country is whether it is — and will continue to be — able to sustainably extract the full economic value of its manganese ore resources for national benefit.

Possessing large ore reserves is only the starting point. The binding constraint is the ability to move that ore to global customers at a cost and level of reliability that justifies sustained mining investment. When logistics inefficiencies drive up costs or undermine predictability, a growing gap emerges between the theoretical value of the resource and the foreign currency, tax revenue and employment actually realised. That gap is not dramatic, but it is persistent — and over time, deeply damaging.

The consequences extend far beyond mining companies. Manganese ore exporters support employment across the value chain, particularly in the Northern Cape, where unemployment stands at approximately 27%. They contribute meaningfully to tax revenues at a time when the fiscus has limited capacity to absorb further losses. When export volumes are constrained by congested rail lines and ports, and underperforming rail systems and ports rather than by market demand — those revenues are lost permanently.

To what extent are cost, distance and system performance defining competitiveness?

In South Africa’s manganese sector, mining and logistics are inseparable.

The main orebodies lie approximately 1 000 km from export terminals, making transport cost and system efficiency decisive determinants of competitiveness — yet largely outside the control of individual producers. As a rough approximation, the cost of producing and delivering a tonne of manganese ore consists of three roughly equal components: mining, inland transport to port, and onward delivery to endusers, primarily in Asia, India and Europe.

In a market where global demand is relatively stable and producers compete within a tight cost band, logistics performance becomes the decisive factor. South Africa’s freight rail operates on narrow gauge, with lower axle loads and challenging gradients. This requires more wagons, more energy and higher operating costs to transport the same volume as many global peers. Over time, these structural disadvantages shape production decisions, deter new investment and influence the longterm trajectory of the sector.