Burson Buchanan had a busy Mining Indaba 2025, the conference where the great and good of the African mining industry convene for a 3-day event in sunny Cape Town in early February.
By Bobby Morse, Senior Partner
We kicked off with a site visit to the Mogale Tailings Mine in Western Johannesburg, which just started commercial production in December last. One of Pan African’s operations, this new state of the art tailings operation is a highly profitable and environmentally beneficial gold mine, which is now generating strong cash flow, employing over 500 direct jobs, as well as cleaning up liabilities generated from previous mining activities. Mogale is expected to produce between 50,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold annually, which is great timing considering gold is pushing towards record highs and is close to breaching US$3,000/oz.
Moving south to Cape Town, the annual Diggers vs Dealers cricket match on Sunday 2 February, organised by Burson Buchanan and now very much established as the curtain raiser for Mining Indaba, was attended by over 200 guests combining the financial and mining worlds ahead of the conference. The conviviality of the food and drink on offer did not lessen the competitivity of the cricket match, for the tenth year, with the Diggers overcoming an obdurate Dealers team to record the second win in a row, in hot and sultry conditions. A shout out to the other cricket event sponsors including Hannam & Partners, StoneX and Wia Gold, who helped make this great sporting and social event happen. The new cricket equipment and kits were donated to a local charity, Calling Education, a not-for-profit organisation building high-quality secondary schools for low-income families in the Cape and Stellenbosch regions. They have built two such schools to date, with a third in construction, and the ability to offer their students high quality safety equipment for playing cricket is essential to encouraging healthy extra-curricular activities among students.
Starting on the Monday, the Mining Indaba conference itself was somewhat polarized by the contrasting forces of strong metal price momentum, particularly gold which reached an all-time during the conference, dampened by the spectre of the new US Administration imposing punitive tariffs on a plethora of its close trading partners. In addition, the constant drumbeat on the sheer volume of critical metals required for the energy transition continued unabated from previous years, with greater recognition that Africa, as a continent, now has a huge opportunity to play a much bigger role beyond its key commodities of copper and cobalt, particularly from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia. Connected to both those countries, I moderated a high level and extremely well-attended (over 300 guests) panel discussion, hosted by Africa Finance Corporation, at the prestigious One & Only Hotel on Tuesday 4 February.
This panel focused on the game changing Lobito Corridor development, a strategic infrastructure project, co-led by the US and European Union, with funding from AFC, AfDB and Trafigura, which will link the DRC and Zambia’s Copperbelt by rail, connecting with the Lobito Port in Angola – opening up Africa’s Western seaboard to export their valuable products, including copper and cobalt to the western world.
One of the main news items during the conference was the significant fund raise by ASX-listed Predictive Discovery, one of Burson Buchanan’s leading gold mining clients, who welcomed both the Lundin family from Sweden, and Zijing Corporation, a giant Chinese gold company, as strategic investors in Predictive, raising almost A$70m to accelerate the development of its flagship Bankan Gold Project in Guinea, West Africa, currently Africa’s largest gold development project.
Burson Buchanan also had numerous engagements with its other clients attending the conference, with Kodal Minerals updating the market on its Bougouni Lithium Project in Southern Mali, which has since gone into production; Sovereign Metals presenting the Kasiya project in Malawi, the largest known rutile and second largest graphite deposit on the planet, following its comprehensive optimised PFS announcement; as well as private companies Westate Resources (gold in Zambia) and Koidu (diamonds in Sierra Leone), having a number of impactful investor meetings.
All in all a very busy 3 days…