The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC) followed a strategic and targeted approach earlier this year to enable South African mining equipment manufacturers to secure partnerships to supply the Zambian mining market.

While the initial intention is to increase local manufacturers’ footprint in Zambia, the DTIC will eventually work towards enabling South African mining equipment manufacturers to export to other African markets that are also mining-focused.

The department identified seventeen countries, from which they chose four to focus on initially, says DTIC minerals processing deputy director Abiel Mohlahlo.

He tells Mining Weekly that, after a rigorous selection process, Ghana, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe were chosen because of their natural minerals endowment, and the significant number of South African engineers who are already working there.

Subsequently, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African Union have created programmes to develop common markets for the entire region. The DTIC would, ideally, like to have input in the proposed strategies so that other countries within the region can regard South African products as local to the SADC region and vice versa, he explains.

“One of the outputs so far is that we have negotiated a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Zambian Development Agency, which is the implementation arm of our counterpart ministry in Zambia. We have the endorsement of the Zambia Ministry of Mines and the Higher Commission and, hopefully, one of its mining clusters will be signatories of that MoU,” says DTIC minerals processing director Yusuf Timol.

The DTIC will follow a similar approach with regard to Ghana, followed by the DRC and Zimbabwe.

“In the long run, we would also like to engage other African mining countries with their own mining equipment manufacturers so that they can transition economically and supply other industries,” Mohlahlo points out.

Further, the DTIC currently serves on the board of public–private mining industry collaboration the Mandela Mining Precinct and funds a large portion of its research. The department also represents the interests of industrial cluster Mining Equipment Manufacturers of South Africa to ensure that local manufacturers are at the forefront of developing mining equipment for the next generation.

“We pushed for that cluster to have a permanent presence at the precinct because we wanted to make it the central hive of activity for mining research and development (R&D),” Timol advances.

Mohlaho highlights that the local mining sector lost capacity in terms of R&D over time when funding was reduced. Consequently, the Mandela Mining Precinct is an important collaborative platform for rolling out different programmes in line with the improvement that the sector hopes to achieve.

“One of the key aims was the acceleration of various programmes and it will take some time to regain that capacity. In the long run, we would like to have a test mine, which will enable manufacturers to design products and test them in a mine environment, as mining companies do not have faith in deploying products that they do not know,” he adds.

DTIC minerals processing intern Livhuwani Khobo enthuses that the precinct has the capability to positively grow the mining sector.