South Africa is suffering an unmitigated “copper catastrophe” – fuelled by infrastructure theft, sky-high copper prices and many scrap dealers exporting the red metal for huge profits – to the extent that legitimate copper users cannot find any to buy legally in the country.
South Africa’s vast investment into electricity infrastructure over generations is being systematically stolen, smelted down into ingots and billets, and then exported with impunity by many scrap metal dealers who continue to turn a blind eye to the origin of what they buy.
That’s the view of the Copper Development Agency: Africa (CDAA), a stakeholder in planning counter-strategies with the SA Government for years on the illicit copper economy, as well as monitoring both official action and inaction on the issue.
Read the full story on ProtectionWeb here.
