News

November 04, 2008

For A Bird’s Eye View Of Cluff Gold’s Kalsaka Project In Burkina Faso, Stand On The Ridge Next To The Man With The AK-47

By Alastair Ford

The vultures circling above the mine camp at Algy Cluff’s Kalsaka gold project in Burkina Faso have seen better days. Not only are they unpopular with the locals, to say the least, but there’s also a distinct lack of carnage on the ground for them to feed off. Kalsaka is a few hundred kilometers north west of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, and by rights the presence of so many foreigners and locals at this arid spot ought, after so long, to be providing rich pickings in the traditional manner for vultures. Not so. They get some meager bits of rubbish to pick over, but the kitchen workers at Kalsaka are fairly stingy about what they let get past them. Burkina Faso is, after all, according to BBC research, the third poorest country in the world.

The vultures’ best hope might be for a piece of any roadkill generated as Cluff’s Gold’s haphazard fleet of pickup trucks trundle back and forth between the camp and the mine, five minutes drive north over the brow of a low hill. But the day after the Kalsaka mine was formally opened in a fairly easy-going ceremony by Burkina Faso’s prime minister Tertius Zongo, Minesite trudged along that very track, and there was no roadkill anywhere in evidence. There’s not much around to kill, of...