adminFarirai Machivenyika
Senior Reporter
The Ministry of Mines and Mining Development is hosting a three-day training workshop for officials drawn from various ministries and State agencies to empower them with skills to negotiate better contracts with potential investors in the mining industry, particularly in the gas and oil sectors, for the country’s benefit.
The training workshop, the second such workshop, is being held with the assistance of the African Legal Support Facility.
The ALSF was formed in 2008 to assist African countries negotiate better contracts in the extractive sector and Zimbabwe requested for the organisation’s assistance in 2019.
Mr Charles Afeku, who is an advisor to ALSF director, Mr Olivier Pognon, said it was important that Government officials be empowered to negotiate better and balanced contracts.
“In 2019 the Government of Zimbabwe requested assistance from the ALSF for capacity building for Government officials to be able to negotiate better contracts in the mining sector. As you know Government has been doing a lot of these negotiations in the mining sector but petroleum is new so the support we have today is to enable Government officials to be able to negotiate balanced agreements with the investors.
“We started the support in 2022 and this is the second part of the capacity building. We essentially work with top law firms on the continent and globally to give Government officials adequate skills so that when they negotiate on the other end of the table they are able to get the best deal for the country. There has been some discovery of oil and gas in the country (Zimbabwe) and its important for the country to have the skills so that the investors do not cheat the people,” he said.
Exploration work by Australian firm, Invictus Energy in the Muzarabani area in the north of the country has already confirmed the availability of light oil and gas condensate and helium He said observers have on numerous occasions pointed out that African nations were not getting much benefits from their resources.
“Recently you discovered lithium and the President (Mnangagwa) has been saying that we need to add value to it here and all off that shows that the old way of getting the minerals and exporting them (unprocessed) was not giving us maximum value so to be able to get that maximum value we need to have capacity to do that so that is what we are doing here,” Mr Afeku added.Government has adopted various measures to enhance the country’s benefit from its natural resources including payment of part of royalties by mining houses in the actual minerals they mine while export of unprocessed lithium has been banned.
Government is targeting to establish a US$12 billion mining industry by the end of the year with value addition and beneficiation expected to contribute significantly towards achieving the target.
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