As Director of Mining and Industrial Water Quality Regulation at South Africa’s Department of Water and Sanitation, Raquel Nosie Mazwi is an important voice on water-related issues within mining. She is also an advisory board member for the Water in Mining Global Summit 2026 and has previously spoken at Water in Mining on topics including overcoming water management challenges at legacy mines and managing rapid changes in the regulatory landscape. Water in Mining sat down with her to discuss some of the regulatory trends that companies need to be aware of in the coming months and years. Please could you give us an overview of your current role. I work for the South African national government in the Department of Water and Sanitation at our head office. I have worked at the Department for the past 23 years, specialising in water quality management. I'm currently responsible for drafting regulations for water resource protection. I'm also responsible for regulating mines in terms of their mine water management, and, within that, I have oversight of three acid mine drainage (AMD) treatment plants, where we treat AMD and then discharge it back into the nearby water resources. What is the general direction of travel for regulation in South Africa? In South Africa, we are moving towards stronger environmental protection. People normally say that the National Water Act, which is our guiding legislation, is one of the strongest legislative frameworks that we have. However, we are moving towards stronger enforcement, as we’ve had the National Water Act since 1998, but I think there are some aspects of it that we have not applied yet. We have the necessary regulations in place, but one of the challenges that we've been struggling with has been compliance monitoring and enforcement. That's where we are focusing most of our energies now in terms of regulation. South Africa also aligns with global principles such as sustainable development (we report on the SDGs), climate change governance, polluter pays principles and public participation, among others. From your perspective, how can companies put themselves in the best position to meet evolving regulator expectations? In South Africa, our companies are ahead of us, the regulators, in terms of wanting to meet some of the legislative requirements. For example, they've come up with new technologies that we currently have not put regulations in place to accommodate – we are actually lagging behind them in terms of that. However, what I think is important for the mining sector is for the companies to be proactive in how they manage their mine water and transparent about what they are doing. That means moving away from treating compliance as a minimum requirement. It’s very important that they are proactive in managing their mine water, in how they comply with regulations, and in continuously changing and adapting as new technologies come along. How can mining companies build a constructive relationship with regulators and other stakeholders? It's important that the companies have a good relationship with us, but they also need to move towards self-regulation and doing their own internal audits – checking whether they comply before we come to do the compliance monitoring and enforcement. They also need to have a good relationship with civil society and the communities around them. We as a department run what we call ‘catchment management forums’. These are water resource management forums at the local or catchment level, where different stakeholders come together, including civil society, municipalities, the mining sector, and other sectors – such as agriculture – that are predominant in the area. They meet on a quarterly basis to discuss local water management challenges, and to try to come up with solutions. What you find at those forums is that the mines report their water quality monitoring issues and data, and it then becomes a transparent forum where they will also report on some of the incidents that they may have had where pollution could have occurred. Tell me more about the catchment management forums and your learnings from running them. As a department, we've put a condition into the companies’ water use licenses to say that they need to belong to a forum in their area. Before we put that condition in, they normally would not attend, but now it's a prerequisite as part of their licencing conditions. What we've also found is that when you move the chairmanship of those forums to somebody outside of the department, they work better. The participants feel more included, and they feel it's their catchment forum, and it’s not something that belongs to the department. I think that's what is making them work. Previously we used to struggle, but now most of them are up and running and doing quite well. Have you had any feedback from the mining companies on the forums? I wouldn’t say we've had feedback from all the forums, but from speaking to people while at the forum, I think it has helped them to navigate much more easily within their communities and civil society. You don't find civil society and communities opposing some of the projects that they previously did. It's an open dialogue – people know where to come to if they have challenges, and they try to address them at that forum. As a result, you don't find people appealing licenses or environmental authorisations that have been issued. For the companies, they feel like it has created more trust between them and the communities that they serve. What are some of the challenges related to mine closure? Mine closure is something that we are struggling with as a country. It could be that our legislative framework is not yet clear, or – if it is clear – I don't think we are enforcing it the way we are supposed to enforce it. What we try to do with the current mines is concurrent mine rehabilitation – the companies rehabilitate portions of mining as they finish them. That is working out well, but what we are struggling with as a country is the other uses for land after closure. The mines are coming up with new ways of reusing or repurposing the land, but from a regulatory perspective, I think we are not yet clear on repurposing. Another challenge that we are struggling with is mine water management after closure. You can close a mine, and then you find that the impacts come 15 years later. For example, the water table might rise and, all of a sudden, you have mines that are decanting, but the people are long gone. We have not issued a lot of mine closure certificates in South Africa because of the latent impacts from mine water. How are you addressing those challenges? We have a newly approved mine water management policy that tries to deal with proactive closure strategies, apportionment of liabilities, and also ensuring that there is adequate financial provisioning for post closure in line with the mine closure strategy currently being drafted by our sister Department responsible for mining. We are currently still in the process of drafting an implementation plan for that policy. We will take that to the stakeholders once it has been drafted for their inputs and recommendations so that we agree on trying to close the gaps in terms of mine closure and mine water management. How can we apply circular economy principles to our management of mining-related water resources, and how does this impact your thinking as a regulator? I think the mindset is changing in terms of the circular economy, because we are realising that we cannot run away from waste when it comes to the mining process. Our sister department now has a National Waste Management Strategy to try and ensure that we prevent and reduce waste, but also that we promote reuse, recycling, and the recovery of materials. As an example, where we would previously just dump the sludge and the brine from the treatment plants, we are now looking at taking it to industries that can use it. Moving towards the circular economy is something that we are talking about a lot, and it's part of our National Water Resource Strategy 3. We are also now looking at emergent minerals, where we are remining old dumps to try and find minerals like lithium and cobalt that we can use in the manufacturing of batteries and clean technologies like that. Circularity is therefore something that we are busy with as a country, and in terms of mine water management, it's a licence condition that companies need to reuse the water at least once in their process. We also have a mine water regulation that we are currently updating to account for new technologies that bring in the circular economy. We are busy drafting that regulation and we should be finalising it in the next year or so.