Alvarez & Marsal MD Johan Coetzee
Image: Supplied
Alvarez & Marsal MD Johan van der Westhuyzn
Image: Supplied
Mining investment is accelerating across Africa, into critical minerals and the infrastructure to move them. Getting the work done is rarely the hard part.
The harder task is governing it reliably, and that gap is where performance is increasingly won or lost.
South Africa, the continent's largest and deepest mining industry, is the clearest case. The sector directly employs close to 470,000 people, contributes 5,8% of GDP (R439 billion), and accounts for 52% of the country's total merchandise export value - contributing more than R100bn annually to the national fiscus.
The country has achieved back-to-back record lows in mine fatalities - 42 in 2024, falling to 41 in 2025 - a genuine and hard-won achievement. But aggregate progress can mask where risk has migrated.
In 2025, fall-of-ground fatalities rose 25% - from 12 to 15 - even as the overall total fell. In 2023/24, more than 4,400 transgressions drew Section 54 stoppage instructions, the kind that signal life-threatening conditions on site.
The most visible gains have been banked. What remains is concentrated in how high-risk work is executed at ground level, and a growing share of that work is performed by contractors.
Across the industry globally, contractors now account for approximately 58% of hours worked at major mining companies, according to the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), and perform some of the highest-risk tasks on site.
Yet many organisations have built strong procurement and commercial disciplines, while leaving operational partner management significantly underdeveloped - fragmented onboarding, inconsistent standards from site to site, weak field-level verification, and limited visibility into actual execution.
As mining operations become larger, more distributed, and more contractor-dependent, this gap is becoming increasingly material.
South Africa's fatality record is a genuine achievement, and the industry deserves credit for it.
But the residual risk is real, and it sits in a specific place: the execution layer, where contractor work is performed and overseen. Organisations that have built good commercial frameworks for managing contractors have not always built the operational capability to govern them.
That gap is where incidents happen, where costs blow out, and where projects fall behind.
Historically, contractor management was viewed primarily through a commercial lens, i.e., contracts, pricing, and supplier administration. Today that approach is no longer sufficient. Business partners now shape operational continuity, production stability, asset reliability, project execution, and safety performance.
The strongest operators are reframing key contractors not as suppliers to be administered, but as extensions of the operating model - requiring aligned standards, shared accountability, capability verification before deployment, and structured governance that reaches the frontline.
Because contractor performance is now inseparable from operational performance, the question has shifted. It is no longer whether the right supplier was chosen on commercial terms. It is whether an organisation can verify, across thousands of people and tasks, that the work is being done safely and to standard.
For mining leaders, this creates a practical set of questions: can the site verify contractor competencies before deployment? Are contractor KPIs linked to safety, productivity, and quality, rather than cost alone? Are standards applied consistently across sites?
Do frontline supervisors have the authority to stop unsafe or non-standard work? And is contractor performance reviewed as an operational issue, not only a commercial or compliance matter?
We see this consistently across the region. Companies have invested in procurement systems, compliance frameworks, and reporting dashboards. What they often lack is operational ownership and the field-level capability to verify that governance actually translates into how work gets done. When a contractor is deployed into that environment, the weakness is amplified, not hidden.
One of the biggest lessons from mining transformations is that implementation is rarely a systems problem alone. The technical framework is usually not the hardest part. The real challenge is operational adoption.
Many organisations design governance models centrally but underestimate site variability, overestimate operational readiness, and fail to align implementation with operational realities. The result is implementation fatigue, local workarounds, and systems that become increasingly administrative, while genuine field-level assurance remains weak.
Sustainable contractor governance is ultimately a culture and capability challenge, not a compliance exercise.
The organisations that sustain improvement are those that embed contractor management into everyday operational routines, empower frontline leadership, and build systems that function as operational tools first and compliance tools second.
Across Africa's resource and infrastructure sectors, the binding constraint is rarely ambition or capital; it is execution. Poorly governed contractor work is one of the largest hidden cost and risk drivers in mining.
The organisations that close this gap will pull ahead on reliability, productivity, and resilience. That is the competitive differentiator most operators are not yet treating as one.
Johan van der Westhuyzn and Johan Coetzee are MD's at Alvarez & Marsal Infrastructure & Capital Projects