Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi has given the assurance that the proposed Macuse port and railway project will be implemented within the next five years. He was addressing members of the public in the Namacurra district of Zambézia province, the newspaper Notícias reported. The railway and port project, approved in principle in late 2013, will provide another export route for coal produced in the country’s inland Tete province. The new railway will run 525 km from the Moatize district, in Tete, to Macuse, in Zambézia, where a new port will be built. The cost of the entire project was previously estimated at $3.5-billion and it will provide a third rail connection for Moatize and Tete, after the existing Sena line to Beira and the recently completed line to Nacala, via Malawi.

In his address, the President described the Macuse project as being intended to bring development to the whole of the central region of Zambézia. (The new railway, like the Sena and Nacala lines, will also be used to carry other products as well as coal: the Namacurra district, which lies some 50 km from Macuse, is, Nyusi pointed out, agriculturally rich, producing rice, beans and cattle.) Currently, a study is being conducted into exactly where the port should be built, taking into account the depth of the waters in the area. Macuse lies just to the north-east of the port city of Quelimane. But Quelimane is a river port, on the Bon Sinais river, and so is not suitable to handle the giant bulk carriers used to transport coal.

He highlighted that the project, and other development programmes, were the fruits of peace. “Peace is what we all want to develop Mozambique,” affirmed the President. “We want all our brothers who are in the bush (a reference to hard-core militants of opposition party Renamo; Zambézia is one of its power bases) to come here to work with us and solve, together, our problems.”

Meanwhile, quite separately, Australian junior miner Triton Minerals has announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Rubicon Resources as its preferred service provider in Mozambique. Triton is developing three graphite projects in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. They are Balama North, Balama South and Ancuabe. The company currently holds 80% of each of these but is in the process of increasing this to 100% in all of them.

In terms of the deal, Rubicon’s subsidiary in Mozambique, PacMoz, will provide support services for Triton’s operations in the country. The miner stated that these services will include “permitting, licensing, business administration, human resources (including recruitment, contract management, training and immigration) and legal support.”

Quite unrelated, British junior Xtract Resources recently raised £4.4-million from the sale of ordinary shares (at £0.30 per share) which, it stated, would be used to help fund the purchase of Manica Gold mining licence 3990C, in Mozambique, from Auroch Minerals. (The deal involves paying Auroch $4.5-million – note dollars, not pounds – in cash, new ordinary shares worth $6.5-million and settling project-related debts up to $1.5-million.)

Manica Gold includes the Fair Bride project, the bankable feasibility study of which, Xtract reported, is only six months away from completion. Operations could start in 18 months, and annual gold production could be about 50 000 oz at a cash cost of $650/oz. The Fair Bride resource – which is Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant – comprises 900 000 oz of gold (9.5-million tons of ore at a grade of 3.01g/t). “The project has been granted a mining licence and will be Mozambique’s first commercial gold operation generating first- mover advantage in a highly prospective underexplored but well-documented artisanal mining camp,” pointed out the company. (Xtract also operates the Chépica gold and copper mine, in Chile, and is developing the O’Kiep and Carolusberg tailings reprocessing project, in South Africa.)