News

March 30, 2009

As Zimbabawe Picks Itself Up, Mwana Africa Will Reopen Freda Rebecca And Move Rapidly To Production Of 90,000 Ounces Of Gold Per Year

By Alastair Ford

Here’s one for those who like their glasses half empty: nickel in Zimbabwe. And for those who like their glasses half full, try this: gold in Zimbabwe. Yes, it’s a sign of just how much of a difference allowing the MDC to do away with the archaic and hugely damaging currency controls in Zimbabwe has made that it’s now possible to talk of a glass half full, glass half empty situation. At the end of last year the glass was totally empty, no room for half-measures or doubt. The last of the serious international gold miners, who were themselves the last of the miners, had packed up and left town not long since, still waiting on payment for gold mandatorily sold to the Zimbabwean government. No-one was unduly surprised when those payments started to take longer and longer to come in, nor when they stopped altogether, and so in turn, no one was unduly surprised when one by one the gold mining companies gradually hit the off buttons at their operations.

But the MDC’s inclusion in government, if it’s done nothing else, has allowed Zimbabwe to move from an economy dollarized de facto through the black market to one where transactions in hard foreign currency are now officially sanctioned. That’s gone some way to freeing up the logjam in public administration, and in the mining sector, surely one of the few areas of industry which can start generating much needed hard currency fairly quickly, a new, more relaxed approach is very much in evidence....