Gold Mining Today (Comment‪)‬

In their 1992 article published in Transformation 20, Jean Leger and Martin Nicol addressed the following question: What could be done to ensure the survival of gold mining as a generator of wealth, export revenue and provider of employment, given a stagnant gold price, a 15.5 per cent inflation rate and ingrained employment inequities? The authors raised an important question given the fact that the gold mining industry was the bedrock of South Africa's industrialisation and economic development (Lipton 1985, Trapido 1975). Indeed the 1990s was an era of low gold price. South Africa's gold mining sector went through a severe gold slump. As Leger and Nicol (1992) point out, the productivity of the gold mining industry was being threatened by the falling price of gold, rising working costs, declining levels of gold production and shrinking levels of employment. A number of gold mines became marginal as the gold mining firms found it extremely difficult to mine gold profitably. This had serious repercussions for the country's gold mining sector as a generator of employment and source of revenue not only for South Africa but also neighbouring countries (Crush and James 1995, Harrington et al 2004, Malherbe and Segal 2000, Nattrass 1994, 1995, Seidman 1993, 1997).