Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi has urged the country’s informal miners to organise themselves into associations to help them overcome the difficulties they face. He was addressing informal miners at Montepuez, in Cabo Delgado province, in the north of the country. Associations will also reduce the levels of violence currently found in the country’s informal mining areas. “Associations are welcome and we need to improve them so that they can work better,” he said.

Informal miners in Mozambique work on the surface and tend to seek gold and precious stones, such as rubies, the Notícias newspaper reported. This, the President affirmed, was not sustainable. Informal miners lacked the capacity to carry out exploration and lacked access to the support needed to develop their activities. And the wild competition in areas believed to be rich in minerals led to a prevailing insecurity.

Associations would be able to enter into partnerships with min- ing companies, permitting them to explore and access subsurface minerals. Associations would also be able to monitor and report mining companies that under- took exploration and other activi-ties outside their licence areas. They would also be able to elim- inate “pirate” (or predatory) buying of the minerals extracted by the informal miners, ensuring that the miners benefited from their work.

“You know what our obligations are,” affirmed Nyusi. “We are going to work with the companies which are on the ground, such as Rubi Mining, to see what kind of support could be provided, such as, for example, financing the associations to produce and later sell the product at previously agreed prices.” (Rubi Mining is Montepuez Rubi Mining, generally known in English as Montepuez Ruby Mining, which mines these precious stones in the district and is a 75:25 joint venture between Gemfields of the UK and Mwirit of Mozambique.)

At the same event, Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Pedro Couto pointed out that associations can obtain mining titles. His ministry was ready to do everything it could to support those informal miners who legalised their claims. He also suggested partnerships as a solution to problems faced by the informal miners, but cautioned that such an approach also involved risks, such as not making a good choice of a partner. Also, developing resources often took time. “The associations need to improve their capacity to develop their work and search for partners, who must be evaluated by yourselves,” he told the informal miners.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Mozambique Ports and Railways Company (CFM) president and board chairperson Victor Gomes reported that the country’s Sena line would triple its capacity by the end of this year. The Sena line connects Tete, in the west of the country, to the port city of Beira, and is of critical importance to the metallurgical coal mining industry in the Moatize district of Tete province. Lack of capacity on the Sena line has hampered production ramp-ups at the mines operating in that area, including Vale’s Moatize, ICVL’s Benga and Jindal Steel and Power’s Chirodzi.

Currently, the 575 km Sena rail- way has an annual capacity of 6.5-million tons/year (Mt/y); by the end of December, Gomes assured it would be 20-Mt/y. In terms of traffic, today, the railway can run trains composed of two locomotives and 42 wagons each. Once the upgrading is completed, the line will be able to run 10 to 11 trains a day, each train being com-posed of six locomotives and 100 wagons.

Staying with coal, Jindal Steel & Power has confirmed it is in “very preliminary” talks with the Mozambique government to build a 150 MW thermal power plant. This will, it is reported, burn thermal coal from the Chirodzi mine.