Neal Froneman, the CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater, the world’s biggest miner of platinum, has said that there is growing trust in business compared to the government.
He said that there was little confidence that the government would do the ‘right things’, with greater trust now in business than the state, in many instances.
News24 quoted Froneman, who was speaking at the company’s interim results presentation this week, as saying: ‘What is becoming very clear to us is that civil society is beginning to trust business much more than they trust government leadership.’
Froneman also said that the unrest which swept parts of the country in July was not unexpected.
He noted that the government was more willing to listen to business and the private sector, but he wasn’t ‘overly confident that there is dramatic change about to happen’.
The company presented a set of strong results for the first half of 2021, with profit between January and June recorded at R25.3 billion, compared to R9.7 billion recorded for the same period in 2020.