Tanzania yet to acquire plant to refine gold to full purity

Tanzania doesn’t have a modern refinery to enable it export finished gold products as the current plants in gold mines can only refine it to 80 per cent.

 

This means that major gold mining companies in the country undertake further gold processing in South Africa, Swaziland, China and Japan, which have sophisticated plants able to refine pure gold.

 

A communication expert with a mining company, Nyanda Shuli, told The Guardian that mining companies operating in the country had their own processing plants but with limited capacity to smelt it to pure gold.

Shuli said the situation forced the country to export tainted gold with only 80 per cent purity as the remaining 20 per cent was processed oversees to separate silver and copper products. 

 

He said the refining process to pure gold needs a processing plant with very huge capacity, as the country’s plants can only process to the level of bullion gold, which is not a hundred per cent pure.

 

“There is also the shortage of energy to run the plant, a hindrance to coming up with 100 per cent processed gold. Most of the plants operating in gold mining sites use diesel while the machine requires huge levels of energy and operates around the clock,” he said.

 

Efforts to reach the Tanzania Mineral Auditing Agency (TMAA) on the matter proved futile, much as it not possible to establish the loss the country incurred for not exporting pure gold.

 

According to available data, efforts were made in 2004 by the central bank, in collaboration Mwananchi Gold Company, to put up a gold refining plant, however the plans were finally shelved.

 

Tanzania ranks fourth in Africa in gold production after South Africa, Ghana and Mali. Most of its raw gold concentrates are exported to Japan and China for processing.