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.
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