The ANC has the right diagnosis and the wrong checklist. Declaring chrome and manganese critical and promising, and implementing defensive duties and cheaper power, addresses the obvious problem of sitting on vaults of ore while furnaces rust.
The party is right to pair export control and benefit targets with special electricity deals, but it is wrong to pretend these levers work in isolation from governance gaps that have hollowed out the state.
The numbers are unforgiving. Chrome and manganese are critical and carry that official designation in policy documents outlined by mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe, accounting for 70%-80% of the planet’s reserves and feeding global steel and battery supply chains. In terms of output, SA accounted for about one-third of global output in 2024, mining 7.4-million tonnes — modest growth from 6-million tonnes in 2007. Chrome’s sales alone generated about R63bn, and the sector supports nearly 26,000 jobs.
Manganese was built on steel — about 90% of demand historically — but its strategic value now runs deeper. High-purity manganese is becoming essential for greener steelmaking and next-generation battery chemistries for electric vehicles. SA’s ore, often graded at 33%-52%, sits squarely in that premium band, giving us the natural comparative advantage.
Still, we process only a fraction of that. Industry estimates put local alloying and refining at single digits of total output, with most ore exported raw. Past reviews found about 80% shipped without beneficiation.
What’s more, millions of tonnes of ore leak out of formal value chains annually and billions in downstream value leave with them — R7bn. That is not a market glitch or a rounding number; it is a policy failure. The upshot is that wealth is exported, jobs are foregone and national assets are turned into someone else’s factory input.
China overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy 15 years ago, driven partly by heavy investment in smelting, refining downstream industries. All of that turned it into the dominant value added for commodities such as chrome and manganese.
We exported vast volumes of raw chrome and manganese into China’s industrial machine, watched much of value activity happen offshore and turned to lament one of the world’s highest unemployment rates. That explains why ministers and mining bosses have been shouting at one another for years.
Ferrochrome smelting devours electricity. Power already accounts for almost half of ferrochrome production costs. Negotiated pricing agreements (NPAs) that ring-fence cheaper power supply are the core lever being discussed to restore competitiveness. But NPAs are costly and conditional, and they only work if kilowatts are real, sustained and auditable. Give a permit without verifiable power, and only move the paperwork, not the metal.
The ANC’s package links tariffs, export permits and Transnet fixes — correctly — because a smelter that can’t ship is a stranded asset.
Still, bespoke permits and tariffs create rent-seeking paths if enforcement is weak. Minerals Council SA CEO Mzila Mthenjane supplies the useful caution the ANC needs: electricity is the constraint, miners and communities must be protected from sudden revenue shocks, and poorly sequenced export controls can hollow out jobs rather than save them. He is right to warn that buyers can, and will, divert to alternative suppliers if SA makes beneficiation a political exercise rather than an industrially credible programme.
The ANC has finally matched rhetoric to instruments. That’s progress. The rest is execution. If the state cannot do that, calling chrome and manganese “critical” will be an empty phrase on a long list of false dawns.
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