20100630
allafrica

Pretoria — Government wants to see at least 26 percent of historically disadvantaged South Africans getting a stake in the mining industry by 2014.

She was speaking at the signing of the Stakeholders' Declaration on the Mining Industry Strategy for Sustainable Growth and Meaningful Transformation.

"We all agree on the imperative to transform the economy and to ensure that the economy is more inclusive. However, the transformation has been implemented in the mining industry over the past five years has left much to be desired.

"Other factors that adversely affect the competitiveness and meaningful transformation of the industry include the current shortage of requisite skills and a lack of diversity and equitable representation in the workplace," she said.

Shabangu said a shortage of critical skills could undermine the industry's ability to be competitive.

"Stakeholders have agreed to conduct skills audits and to assess institutional and organisational absorptive capacity by no later than September 2010 and to invest a certain percentage of annual payroll in skills development," she added.

She added that fronting still remained a major threat to the broader transformation objectives of the Mining Charter.

"Such practices do not help the sustainability of empowerment initiatives in society. It is our collective responsibility to discourage, avoid and prevent such practices so as to put the empowerment HDSA on a sustainable path," she said, adding that in some instances, BEE transactions were being put together merely for incorporating blacks as tokens.

"Such unscrupulous practices are not in line with the spirit and the imperative of the transformation which is so badly needed in the sector," Minister Shabangu said.