South Africa’s mining sector has just delivered one of the most profitable years in its history, and the numbers behind that windfall are worth dwelling on before anyone celebrates. According to PwC’s SA Mine 2026 report, revenue among the major companies it tracks jumped from R569-billion to R786-billion in a single year. Ebitda rose from R122-billion to R279-billion, net profit climbed from R65-billion to R185-billion, and free cash flow expanded from R75-billion to R201-billion. Shareholders collected R82-billion during the year, with a further R70.27-billion in dividends declared after the reporting date.
For investors and operators, those figures read as a recovery story. For anyone concerned with how the returns are distributed, they raise a harder question about what decades of mineral profitability have actually produced, and for whom.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-10-11-sa-must-ask-who-really-benefits-from-a-mining-boom/.
The longer record is more revealing still. PwC’s historical series shows losses in 2016 and 2018, but each downturn was followed by very substantial profits: R88-billion in 2020, R208-billion in 2021, R206-billion in 2022, R108-billion in 2023 and R185-billion in 2026. Across 2016 to 2026, the companies in the series generated almost R1-trillion in cumulative net profit and distributed roughly R691-billion to shareholders. This is not an industry structurally incapable of creating wealth. It is an industry that has generated immense wealth through repeated cycles of boom and bust. The open question is where that wealth has gone.
The timing of the debate matters. Daily Maverick reported this week on the warming relationship between the Minerals Council South Africa and the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, with new work streams aimed at unlocking investment, addressing “competitiveness gaps” and securing what industry regards as a successful outcome to the Mineral Resources Development Amendment Bill. There is nothing inherently wrong with government and industry talking, nor with efforts to fix infrastructure, licensing and investor confidence. The concern lies in what a period of extraordinary profitability is being used to justify: accelerating and deepening essentially the same extraction model that has helped produce one of the most unequal societies in the world.
The distributional backdrop is stark. Oxfam South Africa’s newly released report, Hoarded Wealth, Dignity Denied, estimates that the richest 1% of South Africans now own 54.9% of private wealth as of 2024, a greater share than at the dawn of democracy in 1994. The richest 10% hold 85.7% of national wealth, while the bottom half of the population holds negative wealth, meaning debts exceed assets. None of this proves that mining alone caused the inequality; apartheid dispossession, unemployment, unequal education, land ownership, financialisation, tax policy and weak institutions all play their part. But mining sits at the heart of the country’s economic history and has been one of the principal mechanisms through which private fortunes, corporate balance sheets and shareholder wealth were accumulated from finite public resources.
The pattern of policy advocacy is also familiar. When mining faces a downturn, the industry argues that costs must fall, regulation must be reduced, licensing accelerated and investor confidence restored. When profits return, the same profitability becomes evidence of further growth potential. In both scenarios the prescription is remarkably similar: facilitate investment, improve competitiveness, reduce obstacles to extraction. What rarely enters the discussion with equal force is whether the distribution of mineral wealth should change.
The small share of value historically identified as community investment makes that omission striking. PwC’s earlier value-added statements frequently recorded community investment at only 1% or 2% of value distributed, while shareholder returns ran many times higher. In 2022, community investment was reported at 1% against 40% returned to shareholders; in 2023, it was 2% against 37%. PwC itself acknowledged that inconsistent reporting made a robust industry-wide picture of social investment impossible. Even those figures deserve caution. Mining Affected Communities United in Action’s social audits have repeatedly found that up to 70% of the value companies claim to have spent on community projects cannot be independently traced or verified on the ground.
Meanwhile, communities closest to extraction remain marked by deep poverty, unemployment, polluted land and water, unfinished Social and Labour Plan commitments, inadequate infrastructure and very little ownership of the wealth generated around them. The problem is not simply that mining has failed to trickle down. Trickle-down itself has been treated as the model.
That structural reading is now shared beyond advocacy circles. The inequality committee President Cyril Ramaphosa established during South Africa’s G20 presidency, led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, warned that growth and wealth creation do not automatically reduce inequality where ownership, bargaining power and market power remain concentrated. Its focus on “pre-distribution” asks who owns productive assets, how returns to labour and capital are divided, and what rules determine who captures the gains from growth. It calls for deliberate policies to reduce concentrated economic power, strengthen workers’ bargaining power, broaden ownership, rebuild public wealth and use progressive taxation.
Against that backdrop, the direction of mineral-law reform is telling. In Nedlac negotiations on the Amendment Bill, business is pushing for greater emphasis on investment, growth and global competitiveness, while the community constituency argues for explicit commitments to substantive equality, community benefit, environmental and gender justice, democratic accountability and meaningful participation in mineral opportunities. It is extraordinary that, at the very moment the President’s own committee warns about concentrated ownership, reform is being pulled towards investor certainty and accelerated extraction without an equivalent legislative commitment to community ownership and benefit-sharing. A larger mining sector operating through the same distributional architecture can simply produce more extraction and more concentrated wealth.
That is why the 100-Year Debt Campaign has asked Parliament for a much broader inquiry into the mining economy, and the petition’s logic is worth taking seriously from a balance-sheet perspective. It does not assume mining has contributed nothing; quite the opposite. Count the taxes and royalties, the wages, the exports, the infrastructure and procurement, the almost R1-trillion in cumulative profits and the R691-billion in shareholder distributions. Then complete the ledger: minerals depleted, jobs lost, environmental liabilities, abandoned mines, Social and Labour Plan promises against delivery, public money eventually required for repairs, and the durable assets and ownership left in mining communities. Only then ask whether South Africa is wealthier in a broad social sense, or merely its mining companies and asset owners.
The most dangerous conclusion to draw from PwC’s numbers would be that almost R1-trillion in profit proves the country simply needs more of the same. It may prove the opposite: that South Africa has become extraordinarily effective at producing mineral wealth without distributing it in a way that alters the lives of the majority. In a country where the richest 1% already owns more than half of all wealth, the answer cannot be to accelerate the machinery that has historically concentrated it. The question is no longer whether mining can generate wealth; PwC has answered that. The question is whether South Africa can build a mining system in which that wealth, and the returns on it, are shared differently.