Amplats is looking for an investor with iridium balls

If there is mortal danger or a disaster of unimaginable proportions, all us Regular Joes run away.

Spot the journalist - he or she is the one running towards the plume of smoke. Anglo American Platinum (Amplats for short) is looking for an investor who thinks like a journalist.

The world's biggest platinum miner announced yesterday that it wants to sell mines that can produce as much as 600000ounces of the precious metal a year.

Which ones are they selling? The ones that are the most labour-intensive, the ones at which tens of thousands of workers went on strike for the first six months of this year.

Amplats management knows the dangers of announcing that it intends retrenching workers at these mines. The last time it said it was going to cull jobs the then mining minister, Susan Shabangu, saw red and threatened to take away its mining licence. Whether her threat was real, and whether her more level-headed successor, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, will do the same, is not really the issue.

Amplats is a mining company. Its investors - which include many of us Regular Joes, through our pension funds - are looking for a decent return. They thought the platinum industry would be a good bet.

So Amplats just wants to focus on getting the ore out of the ground, refining it and selling it. Not all the rest. And the best way to do that is to concentrate on operations elsewhere, specifically in Limpopo, where the company mines more cheaply and probably with less disruption.

No one is really surprised at this move.

There will probably be some form of restructuring at the neighbouring mines of Impala Platinum and Lonmin too.

But there are two big questions: Will Amplats be able to get a decent price for its mines or will it have to virtually give them away? And what will the new owners do with the mines?

Whether the investor running towards that plume of smoke is a cowboy or a conservative, let's hope he runs the mines well. For the sake of the thousands of jobs at stake and the South African economy.