Modern Mining September 2023

WEST AFRICAN PROJECTS

employ roughly a thousand people and at steady state production employ around 650 people, thereby offering much job creation in the area, which is set to further lift employment with the creation of secondary businesses. Key appointments In line with advancing the construction of an open pit oxide mine at Sanankoro, the company appointed key management personnel to broaden its in-house capabilities, including Project Manager, Lourens Steenekamp – who has extensive mining sector experience, having begun his mining career with Gold Fields and more recently worked as Project Manager on various projects including a greenfield oxide operation at the Syama and Tabakaroni mines in Mali for Resolute Mining and as Project Manager at Sissingue and Fimbiasso mines for Perseus Mining in the Côte d’Ivoire. “We also appointed Frikkie Fourie – Mining Consultant, who is well experienced in platinum mining, having worked on the platinum mines in Rustenburg and Galiano Gold in Ghana where he was appointed as Vice President of Mining and head of Geology, Murray Paterson –an accomplished technical geologist with 30 years of experience.” Kenieba Project The AIM-listed entity also holds a large permit of over 200 km² on the highly prospective Senegalese border along the Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier Gold Belt, also known as the ‘Kenieba Window’. In 2020, the company ran an extensive drilling programme which identified large soil anomalies across the permit area. “The results from the drill programme identified a number of gold discoveries, however, since then, our focus has obviously been on achieving a DFS on the Sanankoro Gold project. The Kenieba Project recently had its permit renewed. The project is ideally located in a prime location in a gold belt in Senegal, which has a number of gold mines within 50 km radius. Once we have completed construction

years, it has “nearly half a million ounces of resource outside the reserve” and an additional exploration target consisting of over a million ounces. “Rather than spending 10-15 years taking the project up the value curve by drilling and firming up the resource and then constructing a massive mine, we have drilled only what we felt we needed to, to get the project financed and built. As such, our focus has been on courting investors to finance the construction of a smaller scale mine. Once we have constructed the project, our aim is very much to invest in exploration to expand our resource.” During the construction phase, the project will

Road construction underway.

An image of the soil samples collected.

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20  MODERN MINING  September 2023