Parliament briefed on new mining licensing system as delays persist

South Africa's Portfolio Committee on Mineral and Petroleum Resources was briefed by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, with the deputy minister in attendance, on progress implementing the country's new mining licensing system on 25 November 2025, according to parliamentary records.

The briefing came as the department's long-running effort to replace its dysfunctional Samrad mineral rights system with a modern digital cadastre continued to slip. The project, tendered as far back as August 2021, had already missed a string of announced go-live dates by late 2025, with officials by then pointing to a restricted Western Cape pilot as the realistic near-term milestone rather than a national launch.

Why Parliament is watching

The cadastre sits at the centre of complaints from across the mining industry about South Africa's investment climate: without a reliable, transparent register of who holds which prospecting and mining rights, applicants cannot be sure whether ground is genuinely open, a problem known in the industry as “double pegging.” The Minerals Council has repeatedly told government the system needs to be rolled out “effectively, rapidly and transparently” if it is to restore investor confidence.

Parliamentary oversight of the rollout reflects both its technical difficulty — migrating decades of inconsistent paper records into a searchable digital system — and its political sensitivity, given how central licensing delays have become to criticism of Minister Gwede Mantashe's department. The department has said the delays stem largely from the poor state of the historical paper records it inherited, with mountains of unfiled documents reported in some regional offices, rather than from the underlying cadastre software itself. Minerals Council president Paul Dunne told the department the rollout needed to be expedited as a matter of urgency, warning that further slippage would only deepen scepticism among prospective investors already wary of South Africa's licensing environment. The Western Cape pilot, by contrast, was held up by officials as proof the underlying system could work once clean data was available.

What happens next

The committee's engagement in November 2025 preceded a further year of incremental progress reports through 2026, as the department pushed back its target for full national rollout to 31 March 2027 and continued rolling the system out province by province, starting with the Western Cape.

Sources

• Parliamentary Monitoring Group: Implementation of Mining Licensing System (With Deputy Minister), 25 Nov 2025
• Miningmx: SA miners fear the worst in mineral cadastre award, 08 Jun 2026

Photo: The Parliament of South Africa building in Cape Town. Dietmar Rabich, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.