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If you want to address the social failings of the mining industry, seek divine guidance. And better still, go right to the top.
Mark Cutifani, the CEO of Anglo American, one of the world’s largest mining companies, revealed on Tuesday that he led a delegation to the Vatican in order to improve the mining industry’s community relations.
Speaking at an innovaBRICS conference in London, Cutifani, who had delivered a speech calling for greater innovation in the mining sector, was responding to a question about community engagement. In his response, he said: “I’ve just come back from the Vatican”, leading a delegation including Northwestern University of Chicago and members of the mining industry, and that while there he met Cardinal Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian who is president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, upon which he reports directly to the Pope.
“The largest funder of NGOs across the globe is the Catholic Church,” Cutifani said. “What we often find in trying to engage with communities is that the church, and church leadership, is very important in those communities, and they have a very negative perception of us as an industry. We were looking for some guidance on how we might start a conversation.”
Cutifani – who introduced himself as “an Aussie mining engineer” – became Anglo American’s CEO earlier this year from AngloGold Ashanti, where he was also CEO. His tenure has been characterised by a conciliatory attitude, particularly through his chairing of the South African Chamber of Mines, at a time when suspicion of the mining industry is particularly intense – a fact that came to the fore when industrial action among South African miners last year led to the Marikana massacre.
“The principal was: how do we engage the communities in a way that means something to them, and that is respectful of the things that they value in society,” he said. He called it “a great two days of reflection. As engineers we think in a box. We are very functional and we like to think we build the world and make things work. But at the end of the day our social engineering is pretty poor.”
In earlier remarks he said that the mining industry spends less than 0.3% of its revenue on innovation at a time when costs of extraction are increasing by 7 to 15% year on year, depending on the resource. “It is a critical issue we need to change. We are 30-odd years behind our colleagues in the manufacturing sector in terms of the way we run our operations.”
