President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said a new policy which compels miners to pay half of their royalties in minerals and in cash will start this month to enable the country to build reserves of valuable minerals.
Writing in his weekly column published in The Sunday Mail newspaper, Mnangagwa said Zimbabwe seeks to build a national reserve of valuable minerals that include gold, diamond, platinum and lithium. He wrote:
To that end, we have decided on this new policy which is dynamic, and which for a start targets four of our key minerals.
Two of them are precious; they are gold and diamonds.
These must now be stockpiled both for prudence and inter-generational equity.
The other two are high-value minerals, and these are lithium and platinum group of metals, PGMs.
Mining companies that operate in Zimbabwe include subsidiaries of Impala Platinum Ltd., Anglo American Platinum Ltd. and Sibanye Gold Ltd.
The southern African country has the world’s third-largest reserves of platinum, and also mines nickel, chrome, lithium, copper, tin and coal, among other minerals.