Mining and Geopolitics: Who controls Southern Africa’s platinum?
- Doctor Mbuso Moyo
In the first of our Viewpoints series, which features guest written articles from people on the continent.
Dr Mbuso Moyo examines the geopolitical implications of the ownership of platinum in southern Africa. Dr Moyo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Southern Centre of Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Risk in global terms is usually based on politics, weaponry, the whims of leaders and the control of resources. Billions are spent on state and private intelligence to monitor these matters, but there’s a turmoil brewing that few seem to have noticed: the yo-yo price of platinum and how this could unbalance southern Africa, and the West.
Reach the peak of an airline award scheme and you may be a platinum member, outranking the lower tiers of gold and silver. The same is the case for credit cards and the music industry. Rare, elusive, and valuable. The first two are true for the metal, but while gold is currently above $2,300 per ounce, the supposed top-tier metal is not even reaching $1,000.
Given that you are more likely to find platinum in an engine than a ring, it has a less of a presence in public consciousness than the likes of gold, silver or even copper. And discussions about the metal have long been restricted to academia and the boardrooms of mining houses. But this overlooks two important facts: platinum is an important industrial metal, especially as the world adopts greener technologies; and reserves of the metal are highly concentrated in southern Africa, with South Africa accounting for the vast majority of production and known reserves.
Of course this could change. New reserves could be discovered under the ice shelf of Greenland or the swamps of French Guiana, but after years of searching, no one has found anything. This means that platinum supplies remain limited to a few countries, with the top three producers accounting for over 90 percent of production. These include South Africa, Zimbabwe and Russia. And, although the price of platinum is depressed for now, demand looks set rise with the metal being a key component of the so-called “green hydrogen” industry, amongst many others.
With Russia under sanctions, the importance of southern African production and reserves for the West must not be underestimated. And, therefore, the recent decision of Anglo-American to put its platinum mines in South Africa and Zimbabwe up for sale could have significant regional and global implications.
The London-listed miner’s assets will be of interest to a variety of global players, many of which could be unfriendly to the West. However, with the US focused on its election and the new British government preoccupied with domestic matters, there is a distinct lack of attention given to this development. This could be costly for the West, not only in terms of its standing in southern Africa – a region in which it is currently short on friends – but also in its access to critical resources, such as platinum.
Things in southern Africa are changing rapidly and a lot is at stake.