The Mining and Minerals Amendment Bill is expected before Parliament by the end of the 2025/26 session. It revisits three areas of the 2022 Act that have proved awkward in practice: mineral production sharing agreements, the scope of state participation, and how value addition obligations are enforced.
01What the 2022 Act already did
The parent Act replaced the 2003 law, tightened licensing procedure, made community development agreements mandatory for larger licences and created a formal category for artisanal and small-scale mining. Those were structural changes and most of the sector accepts them.
02Where the friction is
State participation is the disputed clause. Investors want the equity level and its funding mechanism fixed in law rather than negotiated project by project. Government wants flexibility, especially where the National Mining Company takes a stake alongside private developers.
03Value addition enforcement
Truth be told, the export restriction on unprocessed minerals has changed behaviour but created a compliance grey zone: what counts as enough processing differs between gold, iron ore and industrial minerals. The amendment is expected to define thresholds by mineral class rather than leaving it to licence conditions.
04The artisanal question
Nothing in the draft clearly changes the position of association-level miners, who still face the same registration costs. If the amendment passes without addressing that, formalisation will continue to advance faster on paper than in the pits. For now, we watch and we wait.
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