South Africa’s extraordinarily prospective Northern Cape may now be where parts of Australia were in the early 1990s, John Murphy, the newly appointed MD of The Mineral Corporation (TMC), said on Thursday. Speaking to Mining Weekly Online in an exclusive interview at the 21-year-old advisory group’s offices in Bryanston, Murphy said that in the last three years, there had been significant exploration progress in the Northern Cape, where from a development viewpoint, Vedanta’s Gamsberg zinc project was coming on stream, Orion Minerals was resuscitating the dormant Prieska zinc and copper mine, and the Kalahari manganese field had gone from being a backwater ten years ago with two incumbents, to providing 30% of the world’s total supply of manganese, as new operators have come on stream.