Orders will have to be placed this year for the long-lead items for the mine that Randgold Resources plans to begin building in Cote d’Ivoire in January 2008, Randgold Resources CEO Dr Mark Bristow tells Mining Weekly.

He says that first gold is scheduled to be produced at Tongon in the latter half of 2010 and the expectation is that the mine will yield some 250 000 oz a year.

Capital expenditure of $220-million is envisaged for the mine, which will be Cote d’Ivoire’s first commercial-scale gold operation.

Randgold Resources exploration manager Paul Harbidge and his team constructed a camp at Tongon, in the north of the country, in January this year.

Three drilling rigs have been operating 24 hours a day and baseline studies are under way.

“Everyone is going flat out,” Bristow says.

A couple of more results need to come in before models are developed.

The project will be rescoped by September and more details will be given when Randgold Resources presents its quarterly results in October/November.

“The reason we are rescoping is that we will have to place orders for long-lead items this year,” he says.

Once the environmental impact assessment is complete, a start will be made with basic infrastructure.

“The Ivory Coast comes with a lot of established infrastructure compared to Mali,” he points out.

The company, which has a discover-and- develop strategy, has two operating opencast gold mines in Mali, at Morila and Loulo, and two underground mines in the making in the same country at Yalea and Gara.

Collectively, it expects to produce a total of 650 000 oz of gold by 2011 compared with current output of 400 000 oz, Bristow says.

Of Tongon, he says: “We will start construction at this stage in earnest in January.”

The two key long-lead items for which orders will be placed early are the mills, gearboxes and mining fleet.

Bristow describes Cote d’Ivoire as a “highly prospective area” and is, geologically speaking, Randgold’s next-best address outside of Loulo.

On political stability in Cote d’Ivoire, Bristow says he is confident to press ahead with development in the country.

He has contact with both political groupings and, as political risks go across Africa, he believes C�te d’Ivoire to be “very manageable”.

He says that both political groupings have been “very good to their word” and the company has never armed its security personnel.

“We haven’t had the need to and we haven’t even contemplated doing so,” he says.

He says the bombs planted “a couple of hundred metres from our offices in London” would have done far more damage had they gone off than the badly aimed rocket launcher incident that took place recently in Cote d’Ivoire.

He visited Cote d’Ivoire after the incident and reiterates that the buffer zone has been dismantled and there are no armed guards to be seen.

Although there was an expectation that democratic elections would take place in Cote d’Ivoire this year, the question now being asked is whether they will be held in the first half of next year.

“There is a very real determination that the elections take place,” he says.

His contention is that Cote d’Ivoire cannot be compared to Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Randgold Resources, which was created in South Africa in the mid-1990s, procures many of its goods and services from this country and has a buying office in Johannesburg.