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Africa Mining

Anglo American shakes up diamond industry with De Beers takeover – by Peter Koven (National Post – November 5, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Anglo American PLC is poised to be the new leader in the diamond-mining industry after striking a landmark deal that promises to transform the business.

On Friday, Anglo American unveiled an agreement to buy 40% of De Beers, giving it majority control of the company that not only dominates the modern diamond industry, but largely created it.

Since its early years in the 1870s, Johannesburg-based De Beers has been the global leader in diamond mining — it had a market share of more than 80% through the 20th century as it controlled production out of Southern Africa. It still has about 40% of the market today.

De Beers’ influence has been just as strong on the marketing side, in which it helped create huge consumer demand for diamonds by linking them with love and marriage. The phrase “A diamond is forever” is one of its iconic slogans.

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Finding the golden lining [Nuinsco Resources] – by Thomas Watson (Canadian Business Magazine – October 19, 2011)

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/

Executives from Nuinsco Resources, a Toronto-based mineral exploration company, recently checked in to the Corinthia Hotel in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. The oval-shaped structure is known locally as Gadhafi’s Egg; its construction was financed by the notorious Libyan leader. The executives were there to pursue mining opportunities in Sudan, a country with a rough reputation in the Canadian business community and where, until recently, only mad dictators would consider investing in real estate.

For more than two decades, Sudan has been ruled by the Islamist government of Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who spent decades locked in a brutal civil war with Christian separatists in the south. Accused of genocide in the country’s Darfur region, al-Bashir is officially listed as a sponsor of terror by the United States and wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity.

Nevertheless, he earned some credit for allowing the referendum that recently led to an independent South Sudan and effectively ended the country’s war. But Sudan must now confront a severe economic crisis. The country’s annualized rate of inflation was 21% in August, and its division this summer handed the south custody of most oil assets. As a result, the nation is looking to expand its minerals industry.

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‘All-out war’ feared as Congo goes to the polls – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – October 26, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG – One of Africa’s biggest and most unstable countries is sliding toward a resurgence of armed conflict as a crucial election campaign is increasingly tainted by fraud allegations and violent clashes.

Few people are expecting a fair vote on Nov. 28 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and analysts predict that the mounting distrust is likely to trigger more violence after the election. Up to five million people have died since 1998 in Congo in one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars.

Despite the danger signs, the international community has cut back its support for Congo’s democratic process after providing massive funding for Congo’s first-ever democratic election in 2006. The Canadian government is facing criticism for sending only six observers to monitor the election in a vast country of about 72 million people and 62,000 voting stations.

Congo, formerly known as Zaire, is one of the most mineral-rich and strategically important nations in Africa, attracting billions of dollars of investment by Canadian mining companies alone.

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Africa provides a rich seam for resources sector – by Kevin Rudd ( The Australian – October 24, 2011)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

Kevin Rudd is Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs

AFRICA is starting to surprise us. We have known for some time that the continent is changing. After the “lost decade” of the 1980s, many African governments have been democratising and liberalising their economies.

But when we find that, today, six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are from Africa, it’s worth taking a much closer look.

When we do, we see not only Africa’s growth, but the remarkable transformation of Australian business in Africa, particularly in the mining sector. Rewind 20 years, and the involvement of Australian resource companies in Africa was almost non-existent.

Now, about 40 per cent of all Australian overseas mining projects are in Africa. At least 230 Australian companies are active in the resource sector on the African continent. Between them, they are pursuing 650 individual projects in 42 countries. Their total investment is estimated at a whopping $24 billion.

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Plan to stanch flow of ‘conflict minerals’ from Congo causes turmoil – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – October 22, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG – The campaign began as an idealistic effort to halt a horrific epidemic of rape and murder in the heart of Africa. It burgeoned into a powerful consumer movement, culminating in a planned U.S. regulation that is terrifying some of the world’s biggest corporations.

And now, with companies such as Apple Inc. and Motorola desperately seeking an ethical stamp of approval for their latest tablets and smart phones, activists like Joanne Lebert of Ottawa are finding themselves in an unexpected position of influence. Their new certification scheme could help solve a political dilemma that is inflicting turmoil on thousands of African miners and Western corporations.

At the centre of this global battle are the “conflict minerals” – tin, gold, tantalum and tungsten – that have fuelled vicious wars and ruthless militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s biggest and poorest countries. Their proceeds are financing the warlords and armies that are responsible for millions of deaths and sexual assaults over the past decade in one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts.

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Gold industry awaits technology breakthrough – by Dewald van Rensburg (Miningmx.com – October 10, 2011)

 http://www.miningmx.com/

[miningmx.com] — THERE is great excitement about a promising new technology which could make deep underground mining possible and ensure the future of South Africa’s gold industry.

Deep underground mines are engineering miracles, but the limitations of the available technology have long been evident to South Africa’s gold industry.

The world’s deepest mine is AngloGold Ashanti’s Mponeng, which extends about 4km underground. To be able to mine much deeper than this, where millions of currently inaccessible – or uneconomic – fine ounces of gold lie, would require a breakthrough.

Significantly, AngloGold was recently the first group to herald such a breakthrough with an apparently large degree of certainty. Within three to five years the group wants to develop machines to replace mineworkers at the stope face.

This target not only involves machines that can do the work of humans at the “coalface”, but also means the end of mining methods in standard use for more than a century.

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Barrick Gold’s Tanzanian headache: Blood and Stone – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – Report on Business Magazine – October, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Across the cavernous pits and the mountains of waste rock, the alarm wails eerily, warning that an explosion is imminent. Dozens of villagers gather silently at the edge of a pit, past the holes that have been torn in the fence, waiting for their chance.

Then comes the blast. As a plume of smoke curls into the sky, the scavengers scramble into the pit, eager to prise a living from the freshly smashed rock.

Suddenly the police appear, careering over the rocky road from another corner of the vast mine. The pickup truck full of armed men in green uniforms bounces across the wasteland like a scene from Mad Max. The truck hurtles toward the scavengers, but is halted by a boulder that they have pulled across its path. By the time the police can leap down and move the boulder, the scavengers have scattered into the nearby trees, where they wait for their next opportunity.

This is the daily ritual of conflict at the North Mara gold mine in Tanzania: Intrude and retreat, pursue and withdraw—punctuated by flare-ups that sometimes leave people dead.

For an eyewitness, it’s difficult to reconcile this cycle of violence with the avowed community-friendly policies of the mine’s parent company, Barrick Gold Corp. and the professed goal of its founder, Peter Munk, of making good corporate citizenship the “calling card that precedes us wherever we go.”

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How Congress Devastated Congo – by David Aronson (New York Times OP/ED – August 7, 2011)

http://www.nytimes.com/

David Aronson is a freelance journalist and blogger focusing on Central Africa.

IT’S a long way from the marble halls of Congress to the ailing mining towns of eastern Congo, but the residents of Nyabibwe and Nzibira know exactly what’s to blame for their economic woes.

The “Loi Obama” or Obama Law — as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act of 2010 has become known in the region — includes an obscure provision that requires public companies to indicate what measures they are taking to ensure that minerals in their supply chain don’t benefit warlords in conflict-ravaged Congo. The provision came about in no small part because of the work of high-profile advocacy groups like the Enough Project and Global Witness, which have been working for an end to what they call “conflict minerals.”

Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law has had unintended and devastating consequences, as I saw firsthand on a trip to eastern Congo this summer. The law has brought about a de facto embargo on the minerals mined in the region, including tin, tungsten and the tantalum that is essential for making cellphones.

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Africa’s Emerging Partners [China, Brazil and India]: Friend or foe? by Nicholas Norbrook and Marshall Van Valen (The Africa Report – June 2011)

The Africa Report: An insight into Africa, an outlook on the world.

Land grabs and exploited workers dominate the headlines, but Africa’s relationship with emerging partners is more complex and will boost the continent – if states negotiate wisely.

Fact or fiction? African mineworkers toil for peanuts, under the watchful eye of the gun-toting Chinese overseers. Guinea’s green savannah is etched ragged with intensive palm-oil plantations. Madagascan communities are pushed off their land as South Korean land merchants order the island’s ancestral earth to be ploughed up for export crops. Asian banks rush to sign up African governments for new loans they can ill afford, in exchange for poorly constructed buildings.

Indian gem merchants bribe politicians to gain access to huge diamond reserves, with profits spirited out of the country via anonymous Mauritian front companies. Taxes avoided, workers exploited, environments despoiled, resources bled, countries indebted. The dream deferred.


The bogeymen raised by the advance of Africa’s emerging partners are projections of post-colonial guilt. After decades of achieving little for Africa, the West has been shaken by the arrival of powerful emerging economies on the continent. Self-appointed Africa saviour Sir Bob Geldof says: “China is engaged in an entirely mercantilist expedition in Africa. They are driving huge amounts of growth. But at what cost?” Chinese officials deny the charge. “For China to sustain its development, we need to have a stable supply of energy and minerals. I don’t think that is something bad, or something evil,” says Liu Guijin, China’s special representative for Sudan. Geldof is currently raising $1bn to launch a private equity fund aimed at Africa.
 A new report from the OECD and the African Development Bank (AfDB) is more measured.


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Calls for [South African] nationalisation need to be debated, not dismissed – by Mark Cutifani (Business Day – July 13, 2011)

Business Day is South Africa’s most influential and respected daily newspaper, offering incisive coverage of business, politics, labour and other current affairs, written by the country’s top journalists.

Mark Cutifani is CEO of AngloGold Ashanti and vice-president of the South African Chamber of Mines.

HAVING worked in SA for only four years, I am always reticent to comment on the country’s internal affairs, as I am aware that I do not have a full understanding of local history. However, I do have some sense of what has worked in the economic frameworks of the 30 or so countries in which I have worked and developed new businesses. Where SA is concerned, I remain a great optimist about its future due to the desire in its people to create a truly democratic and egalitarian society.

In this context, the nationalisation issue is troubling, given the polarising nature of the discourse, which is having a divisive effect on our society as we scream and talk past each other. The nature of the debate is frightening domestic and international investors, threatening an important resource of funds needed to deliver on our 5-million jobs target.

We will not deal with these issues through business simply by shouting louder than the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League. Young people are justified in calling for broad social change. The logic behind the call for nationalisation needs to be sensibly debated rather than angrily dismissed. However, only a balanced debate comparing the available options will help us find the right pathway to broad economic liberation.

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The [global] race for rare metals – by Geoffrey York and Brenda Bouw (Globe and Mail – July 16, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media. Brenda Bouw is the Globe’s mining reporter.

VANRHYNSDORP, SOUTH AFRICA, VANCOUVER – Filled with radioactive waste, its buildings gutted and crumbling after 48 years of disuse, the abandoned Steenkampskraal mine would seem to hold little value to anyone.

Until recently, the decaying apartheid-era mine in a remote patch of South African desert was mainly of interest to scientists studying the effects of high radiation on the thousands of bats that hibernate in the empty mine shaft.

But soon the bats will be evicted, the radioactive waste will be buried and the shaft refurbished. The Canadian owners of this mine are scrambling to tap the mine’s rare-earth minerals – possibly the hottest commodity on the planet these days, with immense strategic and technological significance, and pivotal to a global geopolitical rivalry.

As prices soar, there is a frantic global rush to develop new sources of rare earths. These obscure minerals – 17 different elements with futuristic names such as neodymium, samarium, yttrium and lanthanum – are crucial for everything from guided missiles and hybrid cars to flat-screen televisions, iPods and BlackBerry phones.

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Mining the Congo: Golden opportunity [Banro Corp.] – by Jennifer Wells (Toronto Star – July 10, 2011)

Jennifer Wells is a feature writer with the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. No stranger to the mining industry, Ms. Wells won the 1999 National Business Book Award for Fever: The Dark Mystery of the Bre-X Gold Rush as well as covering many other major mining stories.

TWANGIZA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Baraka Zihindula appears small for 13, sitting on his bum on the ground, in his royal blue school shorts and short-sleeved shirt. He’s worrying the earth with a stick in the distracted manner of adolescent boys everywhere as he tells his life story, a task that might seem inflated for a mere 13-year-old, until you learn Baraka’s life thus far has included six years of hard labour.

Baraka was 8 when he started panning for gold, working artisanally as a miner alongside his two brothers and his father, just one more family, invisible amid the million-plus informal miners who scrabble for a subsistence living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Baraka’s family lives in the village of Luchiga and every day, seven out of seven, the boys would accompany their father to the river. A little gold was found just about every day, Baraka says, and that little gold was converted to a little money and with that little money his mother was able to feed the family.

Sometimes the father would keep the boys working overnight.

Seated in the shade of a tree, a stone’s throw from the school he now attends, Baraka has kicked off his plastic sandals. There’s a light breeze, the air is fresh and Baraka looks handsome in his schoolboy uniform.

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Mine workers dig in on wages, pensions, benefits – by Brenda Bouw (Globe and Mail – July 6, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media. Brenda Bouw is the Globe’s mining reporter.

Mine workers are flexing their muscles amid surging commodity prices and increased labour shortages, setting the stage for more union unrest.

Workers at some of the world’s largest copper, gold and coal mines have either walked off the job or are threatening to strike, pushing demands for higher wages, and better job security and benefits.

The labour activism is playing out worldwide, from rolling strikes at Australian coal mines jointly owned by BHP Billiton Ltd. and Mitsubishi Corp., to walkouts at Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold’s giant Grasberg mine in Indonesia. African gold producers AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. and Gold Fields Ltd. are also facing labour action, as is Chile’s state-owned copper giant Codelco.

Mining companies are trying to hold their ground to prevent a further spike in costs, at the same time maintaining output levels to capitalize on near-record prices for gold, copper, silver and coal. Prolonged strike action could lead to production shortages that would in turn drive up prices for resources as it did with nickel last year following lengthy strikes by workers at Brazilian mining giant Vale SA’s Canadian operations.

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Coltan a minefield in the Congo – by Jennifer Wells (Toronto Star – July 3, 2011)

Jennifer Wells is a feature writer with the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. No stranger to the mining industry, Ms. Wells won the 1999 National Business Book Award for Fever: The Dark Mystery of the Bre-X Gold Rush as well as covering many other major mining stories.

“Don’t just shock us. Make us understand.” — Jason Stearns, Congo watcher

So you want to see the minerals!” Edouard Mwangachuchu, senator, Democratic Republic of the Congo, quickly advances toward a cargo trailer situated high on a verdant emerald hilltop in Masisi Territory. It is a glorious day.

Masisi, in the Congolese province of North Kivu, is lush and agriculturally rich, rising in terraced steps more visually fitting the postcard pastures of today’s Rwanda, or possibly the rice plateaus of Vietnam, than the Congo, which often — too often — seems a desiccated and wretched place.

In Masisi the sweet peas are white, the lupines are purple, and the senator, in his straw hat and pink golf shirt, looks the part of the weekend farmer, which he is, crowing that he produces the finest Gouda cheese in all the Congo. The senator is also a mine operator of a modestly mechanized operation, and on this day he is in an expansive mood.

The lock on the cargo trailer is surprisingly slight, given the riches stored inside.

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The Congo’s tin soldiers (Blood Minerals) – by Jennifer Wells (Toronto Star – June 26, 2011)

Jennifer Wells is a feature writer with the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. No stranger to the mining industry, Ms. Wells won the 1999 National Business Book Award for Fever: The Dark Mystery of the Bre-X Gold Rush as well as covering many other major mining stories.

“You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods, cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity.” — Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

BISIE, CONGO—The figure stirs suddenly, rising on one elbow, eyes blinking out from the dark, hand-dug mine shaft. Rough-hewn post-and-beam construction frames the entrance to the pit, partly obscuring the small cot upon which the creuseur has claimed a moment’s rest, a break from the brain-dulling monotony of hacking at the rock face with mallet and chisel and then, by brute strength, hauling broken ore to the surface, toward the sunlight.

At midday the heat is searing, baking an endless vista of rubble painted in colours of titian and yellow ochre. The treeless moonscape is a 45-minute roller-coaster climb beyond the tiny town of Bisie, itself a nine-hour walk — for the fleet of foot — from the nearest road in the eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Bisie “mine” isn’t really a mine at all, but a cassiterite deposit that has enticed creuseurs like diggers to the Klondike. From pits that run to 100 metres deep and more, miners excavate the ore that ultimately will be smelted to tin by big players in the smelting game, players that reside outside of the Congo. The tin is used not just for cans and containers, but in considerable measure by electronics manufacturers for lead-free solders, forging the link between a mountain in the Congo and shopping malls thousands of kilometres away displaying the latest in smart phones and laptops.

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