Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has upped the ante in the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) controversial plans for mining, telling African policy makers yesterday that it was time to "take control" of Africa’s mineral wealth.
Ms Dlamini-Zuma’s fighting talk at a conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) also came as Southern African Development Community (Sadc ) leaders were due to meet in Pretoria to discuss lobbying to get her elected as chairwoman of the African Union (AU) on July 17.
Ms Dlamini-Zuma’s comments were part of the growing endorsement by senior members of the ANC for greater state involvement in mining, and came a day after three major global ratings agencies said the plan was a threat to investor confidence.
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"We should take control of our natural resources. We should beneficiate and also ensure that we do get sufficient benefit from these mineral resources," Ms Dlamini-Zuma told delegates.
"At the moment, the company doing the extraction, (the) beneficiation, gets the resources and gets the financial benefit while the countries and its people receive very little," she said.
A report commissioned by the ANC and discussed at its policy conference last week, proposed a 50% resource rent tax on mining "super profits", along with increased regulation, as well as price and export controls for minerals seen as "strategic".
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