Uncertainty Caused Haphazard Diamond Mining—Official

Anxiety over security of tenure forced diamond mining companies to haphazardly exploit gems in Marange, according to a former senior official at a newly established consolidated government outfit.

Speaking to the mining parliamentary portfolio committee on Monday, the past mineral resources executive at the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC), Takawira Zhou, also said diamond deposits were severely depleted, adding this could compromise the viability of the merged diamond concern.

Zhou said miners rushed to exploit the richest parts of their concessions without proper planning. He added that the majority of the companies did not carry out studies to establish the amount of diamonds in their concessions but just went ahead to extract the precious mineral.

President Robert Mugabe in March said Zimbabwe had lost some $13 billion through diamond leakages and government has just commissioned an undisclosed form to audit former mining companies.

“People tried to start evaluating the deposits when they realised that the deposits were actually running very thin,” said Zhou.

“The companies that started exploiting the resources there chose the richest pieces of ground from any other ground they were given and they never bothered to look at the whole parcel that they were given and to plan as to how to exploit those resources,” he said.

“A lot of those companies did not have plans for the future for their operations. It looked like they were not sure of the security of tenure of the pieces of ground that they were given so they rushed into very rich pieces of ground and exploited as much as they could in the time that they had,” he added.

He told the committee that carat harvests dwindled with time, from up to 45 per tonne when operations commenced in 2009 to as little as 20 per 100 tonne, resulting in the companies revisiting fields previously mined.

When ZCDC was set up early this year, it tried to go deeper underground as alluvial deposits were almost exhausted, but the task has not been easy.

“When we tried to do conglomerate, we realised that it was not child’s play. We almost lost every bit of equipment that we had before we could produce anything so we had to scale back and do a rethinking of the conglomerate,” he said.

“When you get to conglomerate, the grades are very low. The process of extracting a diamond from that conglomerate is very expensive,” he added.