南非黄金采矿业已走下坡路

"Egoli" is the Zulu name for Johannesburg. It means "place of gold". For most of the past century, this city has been the epicenter of the world's gold production. South Africa's gold mines which are the deepest in the world are running out of reserves. The costs of extraction, cooling and safety increase with depth making mines here more expensive to explore. Miners in China and Australia operate in much shallower shafts. And they don't have the power problems that dealt the industry here a devastating blow in 2008.

Production in 2008 fell by 14.5 percent which was over double the sort of normal rate that had been falling at. Because the mining companies had to trim back on shafts and things that were outside of this sort of optimal shafts. Because they were using, had to use a lot less electricity, 90 percent instead of 100 percent.

Then the global economic crisis hit, and worldwide the sector shed 50,000 jobs. Labour unions say South Africa's situation was made worse by government's failure to provide resources to state-owned power company Eskom.

They actually prevented Eskom in planning ahead to build generation capacity. And I remember because I was in the board of Eskom at that time, they said to Eskom the private sector would come to the fore and take up that space, which did not happen.

The Minister of Mineral Resources Susan Shabangu and her department declined cnn an interview. But one power contract that was awarded went to a company part owned by the investment arm of the ruling African National Congress. And that's led to widespread criticism of a conflict of interest. They insist it has no influence over its investment company which stands to make substantial profits from the deal. South Africa certainly needs new power generation. Eskom has raised electricity tariffs by about 25 percent to raise money for investment. But that's hurting companies.

You're small players, have already indicated that they will be using their workforce. You're major players, said, unless something is done basically by producing more tonnage, reorganizing working system, they would have no reason but to lay off.

And for South Africa's mineral wealth, all that glitters is not gold. Johannesburg may have been dethroned as the center of the world's gold production, but experts say South Africa has an abundance of other precious metals to fall back on. 87 percent of the world's platinum reserves are here, and South Africa's also rich in manganese. But if the power problem is not addressed, output of these metals could suffer a similar fate.

Nkepile Mabuse, cnn, Johannesburg.