Mining's contribution to South Africa's GDP has fallen from 21% in 1980 to 8.2% in 2024, with a further contraction to 5.8% recorded in 2025.
In the past eighteen months, thirteen prospecting applications have been submitted to the Department of Minerals and Petroleum Resources across a 170-kilometre stretch of KwaZulu-Natal's South Coast, eleven of them including lithium, one of the minerals most critical to the global energy transition. The trigger is SA Lithium's Highbury Mine near Umzumbe, which began development in mid-2023 and has become one of only three known lithium operations in the country. The KZN lithium rush is the clearest signal yet that South Africa's critical minerals moment has arrived. What happens next will be determined not by geology, but by the same policy architecture that has systematically undermined the sector for three decades.
The structural context is essential. Mining's contribution to South Africa's GDP has fallen from 21% in 1980 to 8.2% in 2024, with a further contraction to 5.8% recorded in 2025. Real exploration spending reached R738 million in 2025, down from a peak of R6.2 billion in 2006, a collapse of more than 85% over two decades, and the seventh consecutive annual decline. The Fraser Institute's 2025 survey placed South Africa 64th out of 68 global mining jurisdictions on policy perception, with respondents representing companies accounting for 90% of the country's annual mineral production by value.
