US$130 Million for gold centres operationalisation
Defold mining has penned two joint venture agreements worth an estimated US$ 130 million meant to operationalise, gold centres in various provinces, with the first centre expected by June this year.
Prince Sunduzani
The signing ceremony was held at the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development offices.
Gold Milling Centres are a concept that was enunciated by the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development to establish service centres that are a one-stop-shop for the miner whereby access to milling services, consumables and technical expertise is readily available.
The gold centres have been for a long time been a moot and implementation of the idea was moving at a Snail pace.
The partnerships between Government’s Defold mining Private Limited, FS mining and Fiore international, are set to augment the activities of small scale miners in various provinces.
These provide equipment and other operational needs of small scale miners and at the same time create a one-stop-shop for all the gold needs of a small scale miner.
This is meant to plug illegal activities in the gold sector, capacitate small scale miners and increase gold deliveries to Fidelity Gold Refinery.
Small scale miners account for 60% of the country’s gold deliveries to Fidelity Printers and Refinery (FPR) and if capacitated have the potential to produce more.
FS mining acting CEO, Mr Morgan Mugawu said the joint venture with Defold will go beyond talk but put action as it is fully capacitated to set up the required structure.
“This joint venture is an operational venture to capacitate the small scale miners right from production up to milling. We are going to put up milling structures. We have been preaching before that we are going to have a one-stop-shop whereby you’ll see everything at the milling centre under one umbrella. We aim to increase gold deliveries to fidelity printers.,” said Mr Mugawu.
“In terms of capacitation, when we talk of the equipment, we will have the milling stations, if we talk of gold centres we will have those. When we talk of the educational facilities to ensure our miners have an entrepreneurship mind we’ve got the systems. FS mining has the technical team, business and operational teams to see this thing through. We are looking at about $100 million for the whole project.”
Defold mining private limited acting projects manager Mr Chancellor Chidziva said the partnership with Fiore international will set up about 6 gold centres.
He said the two partnerships will equip miners with the tools they need to produce more and also reduce the leakages of gold through informal channels.
It is believed that more than $1.5 billion of gold is illegally shipped out of Zimbabwe every year, depriving the economy of crucial foreign-exchange revenues.
You find that each gold centre will be worth about $2.5 million and we are expecting in this partnership and we are expecting in this partnership to establish about six.
“We are expected to set up these centres to address the challenges faced by miners, and also we are hoping to curb a lot of leakages because you will find that when a miner is not offered any gold buying services they tend to go to the parallel market which leads to leakages of our gold so these centres are expected to address that,” said Mr Chidziva.
“These partnerships are different from previous concepts because on these we have established smart partnerships with capable investors who will help us set this up. In the past, the government was going on its own trying to establish these centres. We are partnering with private players to get the required results in terms of efficiency to meet the required expectations.”