Listen here.South Africa has already mined a quarter of all the gold ever pulled out of the ground, and it still has 48,000 tons sitting under the Witwatersrand. So why has annual output collapsed from 1,000 tons to 88? Dr Duarte da Silva, once South Africa's go-to tech guru and now a gold analyst, tells Alec Hogg why central banks are dumping dollars for gold, why he thinks the Witwatersrand's "death" has been declared four times and been wrong every time, and why he calls the way mining majors offload worked-out shafts onto smaller players "nothing short of criminal." He also doesn't hold back on Stilfontein, on JP Morgan's call for 20% gold portfolios, and on why, despite everything, he's not touching crypto..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg: Well, it's been quite some time. He reminded me it's twenty-five years since Dr Duarte da Silva has been on any of the broadcast programmes that I've been running. It kind of ages me a little. But I think, Duarte, it ages you too. Most people will remember you as being the IT guru, in those wonderful days when you took us to the market. You took Moneyweb to the stock market, listed us there. It was heady days. But you've moved from being South Africa's, well, IT guru, people's go-to guy on anything to do with tech, and then you hooked up with the two Jays, Jay Naidoo and Jayendra Naidoo, and then First South Securities, and now you're a gold man. From tech to gold, it's quite a jump.Dr Duarte da Silva: It is indeed, Alec. It's taken me a lifetime to actually appreciate the value of gold. I remember when I was doing the tech sector, when Dimension Data listed in London, it had a market cap that exceeded all of the South African mining companies put together.Alec Hogg: Incredible, when you look back at that. But I guess gold has been fairly in vogue of late. Is that what attracted you?Dr Duarte da Silva: No, actually, I got involved in gold about two years ago, and really by complete chance. I was actually recruited to write a report on a gold company. I took on the gig, had to do some research, and started to realise that the shiny yellow metal was more than just a commodity. And for the first time in my life I started to appreciate the value of it. And really, in the context of what happened post the Ukraine invasion by Russia, and of course the freezing of the Russian bank accounts in 2022, that really changed everything in terms of the world as we see it today. And particularly, you know, the schizophrenic metal called gold: is it a commodity, is it an asset? And really, that was the change. And I really started to appreciate, firstly, that the stuff is really rare. I mean, there's only two hundred and twenty thousand tons of gold that has ever been mined. So if you put that in context, it's a cube twenty-five metres by twenty-five by twenty-five. It's nothing.Alec Hogg: No, it is amazing. And Warren Buffett often says, well, not often, but he used to say that at the AGM when he was asked about gold, he said, well, you can have this twenty-five metre by twenty-five metre cube with all the gold in the world. You can go and sit on top of it, you can look at it, you can polish it, you can shine it. Can't do anything else with it. And that was one of the reasons why he didn't think that gold is worthwhile. But the global central banks think very differently about gold. I love that report you sent out, and we'll talk later about the wonderful articles that you've been writing for BizNews about gold and particular areas of gold. But let's dwell there for a moment on the surge in central bank holdings, in other words, a nation's reserves being put into gold. Give us those numbers at the end of 2025.Dr Duarte da Silva: Well, I mean, literally, particularly the BRICS countries have been piling into gold. In the last five years they've been accumulating gold at between eight hundred and a thousand tons a year, really piling into the commodity, particularly China. Russia has sold a little bit recently, but India, Brazil, the BRICS countries. Of course, well, the S in BRICS has done absolutely nothing for twenty years.Alec Hogg: But what I did find interesting on your note was that number one was China, we can understand that, and then came Poland and Turkey in the sheer scale of the gold holdings that have been purchased. Is this to do with the fact that they're living in pretty dangerous geographies.Dr Duarte da Silva: It's actually got more to do with their view on the dollar. And I think the fact is that in 2022, when America froze Russia's bank accounts, all of a sudden everyone realised that an asset that can be switched off by somebody else is not an asset. And so the view on the dollar as a central reserve, as the basis of central reserve, has changed. And of course then we've seen Trump really come into power again and really accentuate that actually being America's friend is not as safe as it used to be. And particularly the emerging market countries have felt particularly vulnerable. So it has been an asset allocation call, but it's also been a geopolitical risk call.Alec Hogg: Duarte, you look at things in perspective over a long period of time, and when you see what's happened in gold now, is this just a Trump effect in the United States? Can the US win back its credibility amongst these countries and maybe reverse the trend to gold?Dr Duarte da Silva: Well, the surge in gold actually predates Trump's second term, so no, I don't think it's a Trump reaction. The other issue is, of course, the massive debt that America has. Again, that's not of Trump's doing, it just seems to keep increasing, and every president for the last two, three decades has increased that debt. So the question starts to become, what is the desirability of the dollar? And, you know, with China now starting to assume such a global ascendancy in terms of its position, this real contest for the dollar's status as central reserve has massive implications. And I think what we're seeing is a shift away from the dollar. And in the absence of the renminbi being that natural reserve currency, the only natural alternative is gold.Alec Hogg: Your report this morning, that I'm going to just draw on one more time, says that of the world's official reserves, gold has gone from 20% to 27% in 2025, and the dollar down from 46 to 42. But the dollar's still, well, almost double what gold's holding is. What is that telling us? Are we, in other words, in a trend? Or is it still a little bit of an overreaction for the concerns that many have about the US dollar?Dr Duarte da Silva: Actually, Alec, what you need to look at is what the central bank holdings have done. And there's been a crossover there. Gold is now twenty-seven percent of central bank holdings, and the dollar is twenty percent, and the euro fifteen percent. That's been the massive crossover. And it's not necessarily been buying of gold, but it's been the gold appreciation and the decline in the dollar itself, so it's been a double effect. So I think that trend, as I say, has been accentuated by the increase in value. And remember, that's a 2025 report, and it really just went out and everyone seems to have ignored it. So I think this demonstrates a trend. When gold was getting hammered about a month ago, we saw that it went below four thousand dollars, the Chinese continued to use that weakness to officially buy more gold than they've ever bought before. That demonstrates not a flash in the pan, it demonstrates a trend that I don't think will be changed. And again, just remember that the Chinese are probably only declaring a percentage of the value of gold that they're buying.Alec Hogg: The interesting thing when one looks at you personally, and I have a huge regard for your intellect, but being a tech guy and looking at the beneficiaries of the US dollar going down, because of the reasons that you articulated, I would have thought you'd have moved into crypto rather than into gold. So how come it took you into physical rather than into Bitcoin, say?Dr Duarte da Silva: Only crypto I'm prepared to back is the one that's got gold as a basis. I mean, to back a formula, I just don't get it. I'd rather back the dollar, because at least the dollar is backed by the biggest economy on the planet. And that's what you're really doing when you're buying a dollar, you're also buying the biggest debt on the planet. What are you buying when you're buying a crypto? You're buying sentiment. Up or down, there is... And so I am absolutely sold on the technology behind crypto. I'm absolutely not sold on it as a store of value. What it is, it's the money laundering currency of notes.Alec Hogg: Okay, all right, well, that puts me in my place, because we have crypto in our portfolio, and listening to you, we should have gold, we should rather be swapping that out into gold.Dr Duarte da Silva: No, well, I mean, that's a good trade point. Look, in any portfolio, diversity is the strength, so I'm not saying you shouldn't have it. But to me, the movement of crypto, it's very difficult to find a correlation between the movement in crypto and value. So, yes, have it as part of your trading portfolio. But if you read the In Gold We Trust report, there are people like JP Morgan saying, look, in the old days it said sixty-forty, sixty percent of your portfolio in equities, forty percent in debt. They're saying, guys, maybe you should have twenty percent in gold, twenty percent in bonds and sixty percent in equity. Now, that's JP Morgan, that's not Duarte da Silva.Alec Hogg: If that were to happen, if the world were to follow JP Morgan, what would that do to the gold price?Dr Duarte da Silva: Well, there just isn't enough of it, is there? And hence why it is not only a store of value, it is an investment. The scarcity factor, supply and demand, also plays a role. I mean, if you have a look at some of my reports, no new gold has been discovered for two years. That's incredible. First time in recorded history.Alec Hogg: But that's what I want to get into, and particularly the South African angle, that there's more gold in the ground in our country than has been mined in more than a hundred years. That is a scary stat, because if we were to unlock even part of that, it has the potential to really push this economy into hypergrowth again. And the concern is: why isn't that happening? Now, you've spent a lot of time, many, many hours grappling with this issue, and you've shared that with the BizNews tribe and come to some really strong conclusions, which we will touch on. But my sense is, is anybody in Pretoria listening to what Duarte da Silva is saying this time around?Dr Duarte da Silva: I started doing this work really, as one does, for my own benefit, to learn, because I could not understand how we went from my endowment to what is the official view, what we've been indoctrinated to believe, that the gold is finished. And I started to dig deeper and deeper and realised that it's rubbish. It's spread out, the gold, it's not there as a spreadsheet number, it's the endowment that we have, the Witwatersrand, the geology is well known. A hundred thousand tons of endowment, of which fifty thousand has been extracted, forty-eight thousand still remains underground. And that's just the Rand. We've got eighteen greenstone belts in South Africa, most of which haven't even been explored. So there's a massive discrepancy here. And a lot of the assumptions that have been made, and my paper that I'm going to put out in the next few days talks about the four deaths of the Witwatersrand, and it's always premature, and it's always, you know, people underestimate that the gold price doesn't stay put, they underestimate that technology comes along, and they underestimate that new discoveries get made. And every time that they're about to bury the Rand, the Witwatersrand, this comes to be. And I think a lot of the assumptions that closed many, many shafts were done in those deep, dark days of the late nineties, where gold seemed to have stagnated at $250 an ounce. And at that level, if you do your calculations, Hartnady did some calculations and worked out the reserves to be only six thousand tons. But reserves are different from endowment. And when you change your assumption on gold price, your reserves go up, and that's what they never explained to us. And guess what, every single gold company uses a different view on the long-term gold price, so that also makes IFRS a complete nonsense, because you can't compare one reserve to another because they've used a different currency, they've used a different gold price. And I can't understand why the accountants let the geologists run it the way that this is done. So I do get frustrated, because when I look at the wealth that is there, and actually what is being done about it, it is nothing short of criminal by not one party, but by several parties. And I know everyone loves to blame government for everything that's gone wrong in this country, and I'm not going to defend them, because they've done plenty wrong. But in this particular instance, in terms of the gold industry, there are many players here that I think are to blame for where we are, a country that only produces eighty-eight tons of gold, that used to produce a thousand tons of gold a year.Alec Hogg: I want to dwell on one of those specifics, which is Sibanye and its Kloof gold mine. Now, those with some grey hair will recall that Kloof was just the most wonderful gold mine in South Africa, of many. And you highlighted the story of Kloof. Bring it together for us on what's gone on there, because the way I read it, Kloof could actually have a second life, maybe somebody outside of Sibanye will see the opportunity and find a way of getting it away from a group which is now behaving, it appears, like the old mining houses did before they were stripped of assets by more efficient operators.Dr Duarte da Silva: Yeah, look, before I go into that, I've got to defend Sibanye a little bit. I think they've been a fabulous company. They took assets from Goldfields that were jettisoned, and basically created a fantastic company under Froneman, and now Richard is doing a great job. So just to prefix that, I agree with you, because I did put in my note, in 1979, Kloof, I wasn't allowed to buy shares, but my brother was a chartered accountant at the time and bought some Kloof shares in my name, and every day we used to sit and listen to the gold price and the shares on Springbok Radio, or it was either Springbok or the English radio. We used to listen to the gold prices, and Kloof was an unbelievable gold mine, and there remains a massive endowment in there. So let me talk about that, because Kloof is a very difficult mine to mine, it is very deep, and geologically it is difficult to actually mine that area. Richard, there were some fatalities there, and Richard has been managing this process and essentially what looks like scaling back the operations. Having said that, it doesn't look like they've made a final decision. But really what has happened is they've shut down shafts, and really for safety, and I'm not going to argue with the geologist, he certainly knows a hell of a lot more than I do. But the minute you start shutting down shafts, guess what you do? You reduce the economies of scale of that facility, so your AISC increases, and you create this circular dynamic that says, well, the AISC is too high, we're only making a hundred dollars. Well, it's because you're not operating at your optimal level. So there's a lot that can be said in defence of Sibanye and how it manages a very, very difficult deep-level mine situation. And perhaps what they're saying is that you shouldn't be mining Kloof the way you're mining it at the moment. What I'm worried about is what has happened. And this is where it becomes criminal. And Sibanye is certainly not guilty of this, some of the famous names are guilty. You take your mine, you make these assumptions based on a gold price that they predict is going to be that forever, and that's, of course, the nonsense assumption. They then dispose of that mine to a mid-tier player. That mid-tier player mines a little bit of gold for a little bit of time, then that mid-tier player sells it to a small or SME-type player, and we all know the scandals around there. That player goes and strips all the assets, and guess what, abandons the mine and lets it get flooded. And therefore, when it gets flooded, it's virtually impossible to ever go back. And that is what is happening time and time again in this country. So what is happening is that the majors have essentially absconded on the environmental liability by finding a financial-engineering way of getting out of it. And by the time someone wakes up in government that there's an enormous environmental liability, the guys are gone, the transactions have been approved, it's gone through three sets of owners. And to me this is criminal. There's six thousand deserted shafts in South Africa. There's not been a single closure certificate issued since 1994. That in itself is criminal.Alec Hogg: Wow. And I guess that also encourages the zama zamas.Dr Duarte da Silva: Well, now you're going to get me on another issue. The Vala Umgodi programme that was at the heart of Stilfontein, to me, is a crime against humanity. When I was watching that, I could not believe what I was watching. To me this was almost a recount of Sharpeville. Where is the humanity in sealing people that are desperate for a living? You've got to get to the cause of the problem, and the cause isn't the miner, it's the verdict. And the verdict is that many things have gone wrong before we got to that particular position. And there are people, at the end of the day, and we are treating them as subhuman. And I, as a country that has gone through what we've gone through, I'm absolutely disgusted in that situation. I'm not saying that the zama zamas' present form is acceptable, but they have been allowed to grow because of an absence of government, an absence of legislation, and a complete inability to manage the situation.Alec Hogg: So how is this going to be turned around?Dr Duarte da Silva: I mean, we spend more money closing the hole than on exploration. We've still got 40,000 tons of gold under there, and, you know, I think the last stat that I saw, South Africa spent in 2024, 95 million rand on gold exploration. Like, really? I mean, our total exploration last year was 700 million rand. It is disgusting. The world spends about six, seven billion dollars on exploration globally on gold, and couldn't find anything for the last two years. Here we have this stuff all over the place, and we can't actually get anyone to invest or develop it. And that's a topic of many of the papers as well.Alec Hogg: Yeah, but that's also the topic that I would like us to conclude with. What is required to get exploration turned around? Now, there are many people who say legislation is bad, we have perhaps misguided, perhaps avaricious, perhaps just unknowing legislation in place that prevents people from coming into this country and investing. We know the Fraser Institute in Canada has pushed South Africa further and further down the scale, and I guess that also feeds upon itself. So, Duarte, where would you even start? Let's say you were minister of mining, where would you begin to turn this around and start encouraging people, encouraging capital, to extract this endowment?Dr Duarte da Silva: Yeah, I did put a paper together with a number of steps, but instead of reinventing the wheel, one simply has to look across the ocean and look at what Australia's done. Australia has an endowment that is pitiful compared to ours, yet they've got a thriving gold industry that is, people are investing and it is growing. So what have they done right? Well, legislation is critical, to attract capital. It's not so much the rules that they worry about, it's about the stability of the rules, because you do your calculations. If you know that you've got to pay thirty-five percent in tax, you do your calculations, you commit, like Sibanye is doing now to the Burnstone project, six point two billion rand they're investing, and you're investing on a certain set of assumptions based on the rules. Now, if the rules change every five minutes, how can you have any confidence? So you go to your investment committee, they say you're mad, because your assumptions are only correct for a moment in time. So Australia did the most boring thing on the planet: they set their rules twenty years ago and they've not changed it once. How many times have we rehashed our Mining Charter? How many times have we changed the rules? How many times have we moved the milestones? So you have to start with that. And then you've got to encourage the people who are actually doing things. Deep-level mining is tough, and I think in order to really give that a go, you've got to go perhaps the Goldfields route. You know, for years they were the laughing stock, on South Deep, and they have gone fully automated. You almost need a Musk-type thinking. He didn't try and improve, he didn't look at fifty thousand dollars per ton of payload and say, gee, can I make it ten percent better? He reinvented it, and now you can put it up in space at 2,000 tons. So you need that type of thinking for the deep level. But we don't have to start with deep level. We've got 30 million ounces of gold in the dumps. You know the last time we discovered 30 million ounces of gold in the world? I don't know, because in the last twenty years, the biggest discovery was twenty years ago in Indonesia, and it was 22 million ounces. We've got shallow reserves, we're now starting to see: Burnstone is a shallow reserve, and they've committed six point two billion, and I have to take my hat off. I've been really critical on Kloof, well, not critical on Kloof, I've been begging that Kloof gets given another chance, that it doesn't get flooded, because that's what I'm concerned about. But Sibanye's investment and commitment to South Africa is unquestionable, with that type of investment. West Wits Mining's investment at Qala Shallows, those are two new facilities that they're restarting. There is a lot of shallow gold out there that we can... but you've got to create an environment that is conducive to making those decisions. But there are a number of problems that we face. One, the people in our mines are quickly getting old or emigrating, so that skill is leaving. Secondly, the money that we need has gone out the door, and that was really what started my whole writing, rejuvenated my writing, was my moan about Regulation 28 and the money that's flowed out. If you look at superannuation in Australia, that has been an enormous success in savings, but so our savings industry was also an enormous success, but there is a mentality in Australia where they've created an environment where local people are prepared to allocate back to local investment. We don't have that. And I put it squarely in my comrades' face, the investors, that I've spent, I've spent thirty-five years of my career in the investment bank, and I put it squarely in their camp: yes, the rules need to be made better, yes, government needs to support it, but the investors also need to voluntarily support initiatives and projects in South Africa. Now, these things go hand in hand. The people leaving, that's the deepest concern I have, because 140 years of mining skill doesn't get replaced. If these people age and leave or die, you don't replace them, so we've got a ten-year window; in ten years' time those skills will be gone. And finally, the other problem we have, we no longer have the mining houses, the financial infrastructure to support big mining projects, so we've got to actually break this down into sizable investment chunks that are attractive. I think that Sibanye cited a thirty-six percent IRR on the Burnstone project. That's pretty damn good.Alec Hogg: Yeah. Duarte da Silva, it's been wonderful talking to you about a different subject, about gold, and I can encourage you to read Duarte's Gold Papers thereon, on BizNews.com. I'm Alec Hogg.