Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
China has decided to give South Sudan’s mining sector a boost by lending the young state between $1 and 2 billion, the country’s mining minister said on Monday. The full amount will be spread between infrastructure projects, the mining industry and agricultural projects.
Together, the two countries will conduct South Sudan’s first geological survey, funded by a $43 million Chinese loan, Reuters reports. The study will help South Sudan provide mining licenses as it looks at extracting gold and other metals including copper and iron ore.
“We want to enhance the friendship and the very good relationship with South Sudan…to encourage a lot of Chinese companies to join the development of South Sudan,” Chinese ambassador Ma Qiang told Reuters reporters.
Earlier this year the country introduced a mining bill aimed at developing the sector and attracting foreign companies.
Currently, the land-locked nation’s metal resources are mined mainly by small-scale freelance miners looking for gold. Oil exports, South Sudan’s major source of income, are highly dependent on relations with neighbouring Sudan – South Sudan’s former rival in war and now its refiner and transporter of crude.
According to China’s state-owned Xinhua news service, South Sudan is preparing an international investment conference in Juba for December 2013.
2 Comments
Robert_S_Stewart
This is more smoke-and-mirrors from China. Remember Tanzania (1970’s), Uganda (1980’s) and the DR Congo (1990’s)? The Chinese promised billions, sprinkled a few million in bribes to Government Ministers, secured licenses, then raped the daylights out of the resources, stealing billions of dollars of cash in phoney, shoddy construction contracts and theft of raw materials in cheap barter for plastic garbage and AK-47’s.
They imported foreign Chinese criminals released from mental homes and prisons to work on the infrastructure projects, then left them behind when the jobs were finished.
What about the promised billions in loans? Never materialized. They stole the raw materials at $.10 on the dollar valuations in barter and invested nothing.
In Tanzania, collecting on their goodwill investments (the horrific mess of a Tazara Railway that had to be ripped up and rebuilt by Canadians) meant slaughtering 10,000 elephants for ivory on the Serengeti Plains. This devastated tourism for decades.
In Uganda, it meant blowing up the Owen Falls Extension Dam on the Nile River because they didn’t put any structural steel into the concrete. It cost Uganda another $350 mm to complete the job.
In the Congo, it meant seven years of civil war that killed 5 million people and kept the country in the “Heart of Darkness” for another decade. The Bechtel Master Plan to reconstruct the entire country, written in 1997 was rejected.
The $50 billion offered from the World Bank, private lenders and Investment Houses at the Brussels Investment Conference in December 1997, were all scrapped by Laurent Kabila. Instead he accepted bribes, military arms, a few dirty old military helicopters and vacuous promises from China and received in return……absolutely nothing!
CAVEAT EMPTOR – BUYER BEWARE.
Robert_S_Stewart
China has supplied most of the AK-47 arms that has fueled the civil war on both sides of Sudan, North and South for the past 40 years. This instability allowed them to flow the oil through Port Sudan to China and keep American and French companies that discovered (1970’s-80’s) the massive Southern reserves out.
They fueled the genocide in Darfur which is on-going.
Now they bribe both North and South Sudan Governments with tens of millions of dollars promising loans of billions, but they will not see 1% of this. It is a lie!
History says it just isn’t so.
See below.