Africa’s largest miners are in the middle of a technology transition that mixes electrification, automation, digital twins, and remote operations. At the centre are the leaders who translate boardroom strategy into technical programmes that change how mines operate, how communities experience them, and where value accrues. Below are ten of the most consequential CIOs and CTOs shaping that change across the continent right now.
1) Tom McCulley — Chief Technical Officer, Anglo American
Tom McCulley was appointed Anglo American’s Technical Director in 2025 as the group sharpened its technical leadership to drive portfolio simplification, electrification and project delivery. McCulley’s remit includes taking Anglo’s technical capability beyond project execution to systems-level engineering: aligning mine design, power strategy and digital operations so that automation pilots are planned alongside electrification (charging and microgrid) workstreams. His appointment signals Anglo’s intent to knit together long-term decarbonisation goals with immediate automation readiness, a model other African operators are watching closely as they prepare BEV pilots and remote-operations hubs.
2) Robert van Niekerk — Chief Technical & Innovation Officer, Sibanye-Stillwater
Robert van Niekerk has led Sibanye-Stillwater’s technical agenda since his appointment as Chief Technical & Innovation Officer in 2022. A career miner and operational leader, van Niekerk has pivoted Sibanye’s technical team to emphasise digital innovation, tailings and water management, and the operational changes required for electrification and remote operations. His approach is pragmatic: pilots must demonstrate measurable safety gains and lower unit costs before scaling. Locally, that has meant integrating innovation hubs and internal delivery teams with site engineering to accelerate roll-out and ensure social and regulatory alignment.
3) Strini Mudaly — Vice President & Group Head, ICT (CIO), Gold Fields
Strini Mudaly has run Gold Fields’ ICT organisation for well over a decade and has become the group’s public face on digital modernisation. Mudaly’s work is focused on cloud migration, data governance and digital-twin enablement for Gold Fields’ processing plants, programmes intended to stabilise production, reduce unplanned downtime, and deliver predictable throughput across multiple African operations. Gold Fields’ recent statements on digital twins and cloud partnerships show the CIO’s emphasis on turning data into repeatable operational outcomes rather than one-off analytics projects.
4) Marcelo Godoy — Chief Technology Officer, AngloGold Ashanti
Marcelo Godoy is a geostatistician by training with a PhD in strategic mine planning, joined AngloGold Ashanti to drive predictability in mine plans, improve project delivery and deploy digital solutions that lift forecasting reliability. Godoy’s focus combines geology, mine engineering and digital modelling: converting legacy datasets into operational plans that inform autonomous drilling trials, grade-control sensors and scheduling optimisation. In essence, Godoy’s work turns exploration and geological knowledge into operational certainty, a high-value lever for African gold operations facing thin margins and complex ore bodies.
5) Martin White — Executive Vice-President & Chief Technical Officer, Endeavour Mining
Endeavour in 2020, White has used three decades of hands-on mining engineering experience to tighten project delivery and lift production across the group’s West and Central African portfolio. He has standardised project frameworks, enforced capital discipline and linked mine-to-mill optimisation with sensorisation, predictive-maintenance pilots, common data architectures and targeted electrification studies, producing measurable improvements in plant reliability, capex execution and cash margins in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal. White’s pragmatic, delivery-first mindset, paired with an emphasis on workforce upskilling and local supplier participation, has turned complex brownfield assets into repeatable, lower-risk production templates.
6) Mark Munroe — Group Chief Technical Officer, Impala Platinum (Implats)
Mark (Mark C.) Munroe stepped into Implats’ Group CTO role to unify technical strategy across an organisation with deep PGM mining experience. Munroe’s background as a Rustenburg operations leader positions him as a pragmatic implementer: his priorities include mechanisation, underground automation readiness, and capital discipline on projects. For the broader African PGM sector, Munroe’s leadership represents the “make it work at scale” mentality, marrying engineering robustness with incremental automation that coexists with manned operations.
7) Hendrik Kotze — Chief Information Officer, Harmony Gold
Hendrik Kotze is Harmony Gold’s CIO and a long-standing digital executive in South Africa’s mining sector. Kotze’s focus is enterprise architecture, digital governance and enabling data-driven decision-making across Harmony’s geographically dispersed assets. With Harmony pursuing diversification and higher-value projects, Kotze’s role has been to stabilise core systems, enable remote monitoring, and provide the IT backbone necessary for pilots in automation and plant optimisation. His tenure is an example of how CIO leadership bridges IT foundations and future-facing digital programmes.
8) Caroline Glassberg-Powell — Chief Technology Officer, Tracr (De Beers / De Beers Group initiative)
Caroline Glassberg-Powell is the CTO behind Tracr, the De Beers-backed platform that links diamond provenance, blockchain records and downstream traceability. Her work demonstrates a different mode of transformation: instead of mine-floor automation, Tracr applies traceable digital identities, cloud architecture and specialised imaging to certify product authenticity and sustainability for a high-value commodity chain. For African diamond-producing countries, Glassberg-Powell’s work is a reminder that digital transformation can capture value far beyond the mine, into markets and consumer trust.
9) Ilse Cloete — Chief Information Officer, Glencore South Africa (regional CIO profile)
Ilse Cloete is widely cited as Glencore South Africa’s CIO and has appeared in company and social channels representing the firm’s internal technology agenda. Her profile and messaging emphasise enabling operations with reliable enterprise systems, cybersecurity posture, and local digital capability development, all priorities where Glencore’s African operations are large and complex. Cloete’s visible leadership is an example of how regional CIOs can balance Group standards with operational realities across African countries.
10) Johan Meyer — Chief Technology Officer, Exxaro
Johan Meyer is listed on Exxaro’s executive pages as the group’s lead for projects and technology, with responsibility for projects, engineering and technology enablement. In a company navigating a strategic pivot from thermal coal toward diversified minerals and energy, Meyer’s role has been to secure delivery of project pipelines while stewarding technology choices, from decarbonisation engineering to digitisation of plant controls, that underpin Exxaro’s transition. His position highlights how CTOs at diversified African miners must be both project delivery specialists and change managers.
Why these leaders matter — The through-line
Across these ten profiles you’ll see common patterns: executives who combine deep technical or mining engineering backgrounds with product-minded digital experience; leaders who demand measurable operational KPIs from pilots; and an insistence that technology transfers value into local capability rather than simply buying equipment. Whether it’s Tom McCulley aligning electrification and autonomy at Anglo, or Caroline Glassberg-Powell building trust into a diamond value chain, the new measure of success is impact, fewer safety incidents, higher asset utilisation, lower energy intensity and demonstrable economic inclusion.
Each leader profiled here is executing against that mandate in a corporate context: reorganising teams, signing industrial partnerships, and negotiating the workforce and community implications of change. For mining in Africa, that combination of technical delivery and social licence is non-negotiable.