As the recent annual Investing in African Mining Indaba wrapped up in Cape Town, industry leaders, investors and government representatives gathered to assess the state of South Africa’s mining sector and what it means for the broader economy.

And a few trends in SA mining became pretty obvious…

Mining has historically been South Africa’s economic backbone, but its role has diminished significantly. 

The sector reached its all-time peak in the 1970s and early 1980s, when gold production exceeded 1’000 tonnes annually, and mining contributed up to 20% of GDP. 

In 2025, mining accounted for just 6% of the country’s total nominal GDP, while employment had also declined alongside production challenges.

A major concern at the Indaba was the slowdown in exploration. Without new discoveries, the pipeline of future projects shrinks, threatening production over the next decade. And the culprit is mainly that fewer and fewer investors want to fund more exploration in SA.

Investment hesitancy is driven by regulatory uncertainty, energy and rail bottlenecks, and perceptions that South Africa is not business-friendly, deterring investment capital from entering the sector.

In the last 100 years, over a third of all the gold ever mined by humankind came from South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin. We extracted over 50’000 tons of gold between 1887 and 2018 alone. That’s more than triple what China (the current top gold producer) has done in their entire history (just 15,000 tons).

And it’s not gone. South Africa still has the third-largest reserves of unmined gold (worth around $107 billion), right under our feet.

But if no one is looking for it, you can’t mine it and can't benefit from it.

South Africa worked hard to diversify its economy from the purely resources-based one of the 1900s, but the economy would feel the impact of weaker mining. It supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, generates significant export earnings and funds public services through tax revenue. 

A deeper contraction could worsen unemployment, widen fiscal deficits and weaken the rand if commodity prices fall. Resulting in South Africans facing higher living costs, reduced public services and even fewer job opportunities.

Internationally, startups are using AI and data to locate new mineral sources. Adopting similar technologies and reforming regulatory frameworks could help South Africa reverse the decline in exploration and attract fresh investment. And South Africa has all the talent and resources to do the same.

It’s just a case of making it accessible and worthwhile for investors and businesses to ply their skills to reinvigorate mining. 

Because, let’s be honest, it’s not the only sector that’s feeling the pinch of SA’s business-unfriendly nature/perception. We wrote recently about how transformative just a few simple small business reform steps could be for the entire country. 

This news was first featured in our Feb ‘26 newsletter edition on new smart recruitment tech.

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