With the Covid-19 lockdown in full effect until the end of April, South Africa’s mines have scaled down operations on a massive scale.
Law firm Webber Wentzel in a podcast shared on April 15 said Covid-19 “could represent the sucker punch for mines and the economy”.
Exacerbating the situation is the fact that South Africa is heavily reliant on foreign earnings from mineral exports, and that a scale down in operation could potentially spell a scale down of employees – something that South Africa can ill-afford with its unemployment rate sitting at 38%, at the expanded definition, which includes those who have given up on finding jobs.
The country’s official unemployment rate is at about 29%.