Marange Area Miners Ask For More Alluvial Deposits to Mine

(IDEX Online News) – Companies mining diamonds in the Marange area of Zimbabwe are requesting new alluvial deposits, claiming they are running out of diamonds in the ones formerly allocated and do not have the technology currently to mine underground deposits.

They have pledged to start mining the underground deposits once they have the necessary equipment in place.

However, Mines and Mining Development Minister Walter Chidhakwa said miners must balance alluvial and conglomerate operations, and that they should have planned for the eventuality from the beginning of operations, according to a report in allafrica.com.

There are seven companies licensed to mine diamonds in Marange – Mbada Diamonds, Marange Resources, Anjin Investments, Diamond Mining Company, Jinan, Kusena and Gye Nyame.

Chidhakwa also told the mining firms of his anger about them not paying dividends to the government on time, and for not contributing more meaningfully to Zimbabwe's development.

"The challenge we are facing at the moment is that we are operating at below break-even point," Anjin director Munyaradzi Machacha was cited as saying. "Our ore is much deeper at depths of about 40 meters and we have had to abandon mining in some of the areas because it was no longer commercially viable."

Machacha said the firm was trying to identify areas they could mine using existing machinery while exploring and re-adjusting their mining plan to find more cost-effective methods to extract diamonds underground.