Why communities pay for mining

Last week, policymakers and industry executives of mining companies gathered in Cape Town for the annual African Mining Indaba.

- Christopher Rutledge

They followed a familiar script: governments would court investors, companies would promise jobs and growth, and champagne would flow as speakers tout Africa as indispensable to the global energy transition.As always, the emphasis would be on new projects, fresh capital, and untapped opportunities, with no mention of how these ventures tend to end. But in mining, endings matter more than beginnings, because they reveal where power truly lies.

As the clean-energy transition gathers pace, the question of how mining projects end has taken on new urgency. The global race for critical minerals is often framed as a technical challenge: How quickly can fossil fuels be replaced without destabilising supply chains? But the more fundamental issue is who bears the costs of extraction.

For transnational mining corporations, exit has become the most decisive and least regulated phase of value capture. By selling assets, restructuring operations, and relocating headquarters, they are able to shed social, environmental, and fiscal liabilities with impunity.

South Africa offers a striking example. Anglo American, founded in 1917, has long been the country’s dominant mining company, shaping labour systems, settlement patterns, and infrastructure for more than a century. Yet as the company has streamlined its global portfolio in recent years, its domestic footprint has shrunk rapidly. Between 2021 and 2024, its South African workforce fell by more than 20%, from roughly 41,000 to 32,000. Over the same period, its tax and royalty payments plummeted 81%, from approximately R41 billion (80.2 billion baht) to R7.8 billion.