Tanzanian president John Magufuli
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The Tanzanian online mining cadastre system now allows licence holders to request the total licence fees they owe via short message service (SMS).
The addition of SMS extends the range of payment functionality that the Ministry of Energy and Minerals offers to its customers, the FlexiCadastre supplier Spatial Dimensions, headed by South African Bill Feast, reports.
Users, already able to pay for their licensing fees and yearly rents using mobile money, point of sales terminals, National Microfinance Bank branches, electronic funds transfers and credit cards, now also have the SMS option in what is another example of the way Tanzania is striding out under the leadership of its new president, John Magufuli.
The speed of reform in Tanzania under Magufuli has impressed Montero Mining & Exploration president Dr Tony Harwood, who told Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online in a video interview earlier this week that investors, including himself, were already responding.
“You’ve got the man at the top saying, ‘great place this, come and invest, we’re going to clean our house out and make this an attractive destination',” he said.
The TSX-V-listed Montero is already looking around for more projects in Tanzania, to add to the Wigu Hill rare earth element project it already has there.
Reuters reported this week that half of the the 4.89-trillion shillings ($2.24-billion) that the Tanzanian Parliament had approved for the 2016/17 fiscal year would go on transport infrastructure.
The news agency said the aim was for Tanzania to upgrade rickety railways and roads to serve growing economies in the land-locked heart of Africa.
Spatial Dimension, which has sold its highly regarded cadastre system to many countries in Africa but not South Africa where it all began, has also announced Cameroon as its twentieth FlexiCadastre user.
Cameroon recently went out on international tender for a modern mining cadastre system through the mining sector capacity building project called Precasem, to which the World Bank has given $30-million support.
Cote d'Ivoire is another African country that has implemented Spatial Dimension’s modern mining cadastre system.