ANESU M CHATIKOBO | Geological data needs a return metric

South Africa’s junior mining exploration fund makes nonrepayable grants to early-stage explorers. The grants convert to equity or a profit share if the work finds an ore body, and the state financier keeps a right of first refusal over follow-on funding. The state initially put in R400m. A producer added R600m in February 2026, taking the fund to R1bn.

Set the Council for Geoscience’s government grant beside it: R613.6m in 2024/25, R640.6m this year. It funds geological information rather than drilling and recurs annually. Mapping is one programme in it. The state funds two stages of the same exploration process. One has a defined return mechanism. The other supports an earlier stage, where the money buys information rather than a claim on a discovery.

Explorers commit money in sequence. What the next step is worth depends on how much ground the last ruled out. The fund pays for the work that tests a target and reduces uncertainty at that place.

Public geological data pays for the screening that comes first and helps decide which ground is worth testing. That screening changes how fast explorers write off ground and which ground reaches the drill first. Part of its value lies in the ground that never gets tested.

The return mechanism was built into the fund before the first rand went out. The right of first refusal goes further: the state can back its own successes. Conversions lie years out. Meanwhile, the fund reports activity.

Its first window placed R160m with eight of 117 applicants, and two have since reached drilling. Thirteen projects have been funded. Those are output measures, no nearer a realised return than a map sheet. The difference is that the return was specified.

Full coverage at 1:50,000 scale requires 1,916 map sheets. Fewer than 5% had been published when the programme began. By March 2024 the count stood at 307. Another 39 followed in 2024/25, taking coverage to 18%. The year before it published 77. The department has since reported 20% coverage for 2025/26.

At the 2024/25 rate, the sheets still outstanding take about 40 years. The mapping is meant to reduce the time and cost of exploration. A schedule is therefore part of the product. A sheet can only inform the decisions that come after it.

The agency’s plan sets targets for sheets published. Nothing in the reporting shows whether a sheet changes an exploration decision. The quality of the maps is not the question.

A map describes what may lie beneath a piece of ground. It does not establish who may test it. The rights registry does that, and its condition is cited alongside policy uncertainty as a reason exploration spending fell. Where it is slow or contested, public money buys data about ground nobody can licence with confidence.

The agency knows which sheets it released and when. The department knows which prospecting applications were lodged and where. Neither series is published against the other. Doing so would show whether exploration interest clusters around new sheets and the same for metres drilled.

Prices and budgets move at the same time, so a cluster would not prove cause. It would be the first sight of a response.