The Biodiversity Law Centre comments on the Draft Mineral Resources Development Bill
On 20 May 2025, the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources published a draft Mineral Resources Development Bill (MRDB) for public comment. The Bill is intended to amend the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA), which regulates both South Africa’s mineral and petroleum resources. The MPRDA’s regulation of petroleum resources will be separately replaced by the Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act.
The MRDB includes provisions on small-scale and artisanal mining, consultation, beneficiation of minerals and sanctions, and offences and penalties. It has been criticised by mining companies, mining affected community organisations and other civil society organisations (CSOs) alike, with criticisms relating both to the MRDB’s regressions from the MPRDA and its failure to clearly address the MPRDA’s existing problems. In brief, the BLC’s comments critique five matters in the MRDB.
First, while the MPRDA requires consultation with interested and affected parties (IAPs) in applications for prospecting and mining rights and permits, the MRDB expressly requires this consultation to be “meaningful”. The MRDB’s distinction of consultation from a tick-box exercise is welcome. However, the MRDB’s narrow definition of “meaningful consultation” is not. “Meaningful consultation” now concerns only the impact that prospecting or mining activities would have on an IAP’s “right of use of the land”, which both limits the scope of consultation to the impacts of prospecting or mining to IAPs’ land use rights, and excludes all IAPs without rights in land – notably CSOs like the BLC – from being meaningfully consulted altogether. Further, while the MRDB does not change the timeframes within which IAPs must submit their comments and objections to the prospecting and mining rights and permits, the MRDB severely undermines the public participation process required for environmental authorisation (EA) under the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA) by slashing the timeframes for EA applications for prospecting and mining rights from the MPRDA’s respective 60 and 180 days from acceptance of the prospecting and mining rights applications, to a mere 14 days. Two weeks cannot result in a meaningful NEMA public participation process, let alone a meaningful EA application.
Second, the MRDB scraps the MPRDA’s Minerals and Mining Development Board (Board). The Board’s mandate includes advising the Minister on matters including the sustainable development of mineral resources, the transformation and downscaling of the minerals industry, and on objections to prospecting and mining rights and permits, as well as undertaking critical compliance and enforcement investigations. The MPRDA requires Board representation from CSOs, as well as organised labour and business. Despite these provisions, and the MPRDA providing for accountability mechanisms for the Board, in practice the Board is seen as “ineffective”.
The MRDB replaces the Board with a Mineral Advisory Council (Council), which the Minister may (or may not) establish, and which is not required to have any CSO representation. The Council’s mandate will also include advising the Minister on the minerals industry’s “growth”, rather than its downscaling, as provided under the MPRDA. If the Board was perceived as ineffective, the MRDB further neutralises the only body mandated to broadly advise the Minister.
Thirdly, the MRDB makes the Minister the only internal appeal authority in terms of decisions made under the MPRDA. This appears to either make the Minister both the decision maker and appeal authority under the MPRDA, or to mean that the Minister’s decisions under the MPRDA can be subject to judicial review, without requiring an internal appeal. Either is problematic, but it is unclear which the MRDB provides for.
Fourth, the MRDB removes the MPRDA’s requirement that the Minister consult the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (Environment Minister) on requiring urgent remedial measures where prospecting or mining caused ecological degradation, pollution or other environmental damage, harm to health or wellbeing, or contravened its environmental authorisation. This inter-ministerial consultation is necessary as the Environmental Minister holds the mandate, expertise, and legal responsibility for biodiversity conservation, protected areas, and environmental management.
Our final critique of the MRDB is that it wastes an opportunity to provide legal certainty in the context of mining in protected areas and areas earmarked for protected area expansion. While NEMPAA prohibits commercial prospecting and mining in protected areas, marine protected areas and protected environments (without the Environment Minister’s permission), the MPRDA allows the Minister to grant a mining or prospecting right or permit in these areas in certain circumstances, causing confusion on whether mining or prospecting rights may be granted over NEM:PAA protected areas, and thereby threatening the safeguarding of South Africa’s most ecologically valuable and irreplaceable landscapes.
See the Biodiversity Law Centre’s full comments below: