This years’ list of the who’s who of mining, metal and minerals billionaires recently published by the miningnews.com website tells an important story.

First and most importantly, not one of the top 10 billionaires is an American or a European Union  national. Second, no surprise, almost all are men.

Third and perhaps most instructive from a policy standpoint is that almost all were either born rich or are Russian oligarchs who made their money from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Russian giveaway of the 1990s, which was humorously referred to as an “asset sale”.

Not one of the mining super-rich is an African. You have to go to number 20 and 21 in the big-money league to find someone with remote roots in Africa, namely Ivan Glasenberg of Glencore and Nicky Oppenheimer, who was in mining until November last year and sold his 40% in De Beers.

The old rich families are not at the top of the list. The money has been made recently by relatively new people with new mines, who are individuals with enough wealth from daddy to go from millions to billions.

Unlike billionaire icons such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, none of the mining, metal and mineral billionaires in the top 10 or even top 20 are what could be called household names outside of their own countries.

Buying an aristocratic title
The hard-rock men of mining are not rags-to-riches fairy tales such as Jobs and Gates. They made their fortunes digging holes in the ground and refining and trading metal, not from inventing clever gadgets. The only known entities on the list outside their own countries are the Russian oligarchs who own football teams in the United Kingdom or sports franchises in the United States.

The much-hated owner of Arsenal,  Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbekistani, is number three on the mining billionaire list with assets worth $18.1-billion. Roman Ambramovich, number 14 at $12.1-billion (down from $23-billion in 2008), is the owner of Chelsea Football Club. High-flyer Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, number 12 on the list at $13.2-billion, owns the New Jersey Nets.

The purchase of these sporting franchises in the 21st century has become like buying an aristocratic title in the 19th century. It buys the mining super-rich some measure of desperately needed respectability.

But Russian oligarchs and Latin and Indian gazillionaires are not the ones who developed this model of accumulation. The American predecessors of the current crop of the mining super-rich were the Carnegies and the Rockefellers who, in the 19th century, had a less than salubrious climb to great wealth.

Only now their great-grandchildren are “old money” and the sins of the forefathers long forgotten, as will be the case in three generations with many of the Russian oligarchs who plundered Russia’s mining assets at the end of the communist era.

Born rich
It is estimated that the net worth of the 40 richest mining billionaires is in the vicinity of $300-billion in 2011, roughly equivalent to about of 40% of sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product, excluding South Africa. The richest of all the mining plutocrats is Eike Batista, the son of the former chief executive of Vale, Brazil’s largest mining company.

The young Batista is now worth $33-billion and is the richest person in Brazil and the 10th richest in the world. He has said that he wants to be number one. As ever, being born rich really helps if your aim is to make the super-rich list. In mining, your alternatives to being born rich, as elsewhere, appear to be marriage or spending the rest of your life working hard.

This pattern of mining wealth that has resulted from the decade-long boom in commodity prices has a flip side. The accumulation of spectacular wealth by a few people has not gone unnoticed by those African, Asian and Latin American countries where most of these mines are found. Host countries have generally been unhappy with the deals that these companies signed in the 1990s when commodity prices were low and governments were desperate for investment.

As a result, almost every significant mining province in the world has started to change their mining laws over the past few years, giving these mining billionaires sleepless nights. The Rudd government in Australia fell over its attempts to introduce a mining super-tax two years ago. The government of Indonesia, just earlier this year, made it clear that all mining companies must sell off their assets to Indonesian nationals by 2014.

The new “resource nationalism”, as it has come to be called, has been spawned by this relentless accumulation of wealth, caused in turn by a surging mineral and energy demand in China and India. New nationalist mining policies include assured divestiture and local ownership in Zimbabwe and Indonesia, for example. There have been relatively mild rules applied to the compulsory beneficiation of diamonds, such as as in Botswana and Namibia, but Indonesia has gone so far as to ban all exports of any mineral that is not beneficiated.

Unequal distribution of income
Zambia is about to cut new deals with its copper-mining companies.  Additional profit taxes are proposed in South Africa and imposed in Australia. They are supposed to capture high profits when prices rise and are becoming de rigueur. The experience in countries such as Papua New Guinea, which have long had these taxes, is that mining companies and their accountants will find clever ways to avoid them.

An oil plutocrat from another generation, John Paul Getty, once quipped that the meek may inherit the Earth, but not the mining rights. In the few jurisdictions where the mineral rights accrue in part or as a whole to the landowners, they become wealthy and give up their meek ways. But in most jurisdictions, such as throughout Southern Africa,  the state is the owner of the mineral rights. The theory has been that the state gets the mineral wealth and then it shares it among the citizenry.

The reality is more dismal and the countries dominated by mining have the most unequal distribution of income in the world. The three most unequal countries in the world are Namibia, South Africa and Botswana, according to the CIA Factbook. In Asia, the most unequal country is Papua New Guinea.

Future lists
What they all have in common is a large number of expensive, non-indigenous people such as expatriates, a large mining sector and a poor and badly educated indigenous population. Governments are relatively good at creating large infrastructure projects, building schools and hospitals, but by and large they are challenged in terms of implementing difficult and inclusive policies that lift the bulk of the population out of poverty.

The world will continue to be divided into a few super-rich individuals dominating the mining and metals sector and host countries calling for greater equity in the distribution of benefits in increasingly shrill tones as they find it difficult to lift their own citizens out of poverty. Unlike previous cyclical commodity booms, this inequality has a structural element, based on the emergence of China and India as major markets.

Short of a collapse in the emerging economies, next year’s list of billionaires may not be longer, but the value of their assets will certainly be larger.

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis, where he is employed

Mining billionaires
No 1: Eike Batista
(Brazil) with $33-billion.
No 2: Lakshmi Mittal
(India) with $20.7-billion.
No 3: Alisher Usmanov (Uzbekistan) with $18.1-billion.

Charges of incitement of violence, intimidation and illegal gathering were laid at the Hillbrow Police Station at noon.

The DA would also analyse footage of the march to try and identify individual perpetrators, DA spokesperson Kelly Miller said.

“We hope, first of all, that we must all accept the rule of law and we must accept that everything we do must be within legal parameters,” Maimane said.

Miller said four party members were hospitalised and a number of others injured in Tuesday’s clashes.

Blame game
Neither the DA nor Cosatu were willing to accept blame for Tuesday’s chaos on Johannesburg’s streets.

And the ANC finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having to choose sides between its political enemy – which was marching to muster support for the ruling party’s own policies – and its traditional ally – which has publicly denounced the same policies.

The march to Cosatu’s headquarters was organised by the DA to canvass support for (and protest against Cosatu’s opposition to) the ANC-backed youth wage subsidy.

It quickly turned ugly as opposing supporters exchanged insults and hurled missiles at each other.

The march to Cosatu’s headquarters, organised by the DA to canvass support for (and protest against Cosatu’s opposition to) the ANC-backed youth wage subsidy, quickly turned ugly as opposing supporters exchanged insults and hurled missiles at each other.

The police attempted to intervene, using barricades, tear gas and with stun grenade to try to disperse the warring groups.

Aftermath
In the aftermath, both sides registered injuries with several DA and Cosatu supporters and a Mail & Guardian journalist being treated for injuries that ranged from cuts and bruises to head wounds.

The DA was quick to lay blame at the feet of Cosatu, who the party said had gathered illegally, incited violence and committed acts of intimidation.

Cosatu said it was considering legal action against the DA.

“We are certainly considering laying criminal charges against the DA and we will make that decision when we need to,” Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven told the Mail & Guardian.

Craven said the confrontation arose as a result of “confusion” about the direction which the march was taking and suspicions of the “underlying action” being committed by their “class enemies”.

“The main reason for the confrontation that took place is the fundamental gulf in political views between Cosatu and the DA,” he said. “This is not only about the youth wage subsidy, it is about their views on relaxing labour laws, protecting labour brokers and other capitalist centred programs they support.”

Media bias
Cosatu further claimed that the media had shown a distinct bias towards the DA in its coverage of Tuesday’s skirmish.

“There were people from both sides of the confrontation who were injured and in many cases the media failed to report that,” Craven said.

Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini went further on Wednesday, claiming that the DA had arrived looking for a fight.

“Cosatu was portrayed as beating the DA, which was not the case.

Bricks were loaded into a truck and used against our members,” he claimed at Cosatu’s international policy conference in Kempton Park on Wednesday.

ANC chimes in
While the DA and Cosatu squabbled over where to lay the blame, the ANC condemned the violence, but reiterated its view that the DA’s march was “misguided”, saying the DA was “using the wrong platform” to address their concerns and were as such “attention seekers”.

“We as the ANC condemn the violence that took place, but we are clear that the march was misguided as Cosatu is not responsible for government policy,” ANC spokesperson Keith Khoza told the M&G.

Khoza also accused the DA of undermining platforms such as Nedlac, where they could appropriately address their views.

“The issue of unemployment is not going to be solved through a march,” Khoza added. “All economic stakeholders need to come together in order to find a workable and lasting solution to the ongoing problems surrounding jobs in this country.”

While not outright blaming the DA for the violence that unfolded, the ANC maintained its stance that the march was “provocative” on the opposition party’s part.

“We are waiting for a full report on what happened before we lay blame anywhere. However, we will admit there was unnecessary violence and both parties were affected by this,” Khoza said.

“The impasse over the implementation of electronic tolling on newly built roads, demonstrates continued tension between South Africa’s economic and social priorities versus its aspirations to contain the rise in public debt,” investors service, Moody’s said in a credit opinion.

The ongoing struggle to implement the e-tolling system and repay a R20-billion loan was most recently met with a court interdict. National treasury has consistently argued that any delays could affect the South African National Road Agency Limited’s credit rating and jeopardise the state’s ability to raise sovereign debt.

While South Africa displays a high degree of “financial robustness” for a middle-income country, Moody’s has warned that ratings could be downgraded should government debt (which is fast approaching 50% of gross domestic product) and contingent liabilities rise much further.

Of particular concern is “heightened socio-political unrest that is not addressed in a manner consistent with future debt sustainability”.

“While government officials appear determined to lower the budget deficit and stabilise the public debt rations, they rely heavily on optimistic forecasts for both revenue and expenditure. In Moody’s view, there is little additional room for the government to expand its balance sheet at the current A3 rating level. The fiscal space that has been created before the global crisis is now largely gone and an extraordinary effort will be needed in order to regain fiscal flexibility in a less benign global environment …”

The credit opinion said credit challenges for South Africa include: regaining control over public finances in advance of inevitable interest rate increases from all-time lows; weak national savings and large infrastructure constraints; very high unemployment and wide income disparities; HIV/Aids prevalence and its adverse socio-economic consequences.

Moody’s said it was watching the election of the ANC president later this year as well as a policy-setting conference in June. “This calendar will likely lead to increased political manoeuvring in coming months, and possibly the risk that government leaders will become more amenable to the demands from within the ANC and its alliance partners for more activist economic policy.”

The investor’s service said higher domestic savings and investment rates would support a rating upgrade, as would sustainably stronger growth, restrained debt accumulation and the maintenance of sound economic policies by the current administration and its successors.

The credit opinion is not a rating action or rating affirmation, Moody’s noted.