Buzwagi mine assets to be sold next month

ASSETS belonging to Acacia Mining's Buzwagi gold mine will be auctioned next month, as it prepares to end mining activities later this year in transition to processing stockpiles.

According to a public notice mining assets, inventory and plant at Buzwagi will be auctioned on 5th of March at the mining site and will be conducted by Harvest Tanzania Limited, in collaboration with Slattery Auctions of Australia and Liquidity Services of South Africa.

The sale will include mining fleet with spare parts, heavy duty trucks, pickups, light and medium road trucks, lightining plants, generator sets and forklifts.

The newly appointed Acacia Mining General Manager in-charge of operations in Tanzania, Asa Mwaipopo, told the 'Daily News' that the auction follows plans to end mining activities at Buzwagi in the third quarter of this year after depletion of resources. According to him, Buzwagi mine will not be closed as wrongly reported by a section of the media, but it would continue with processing of a stockpiles of materials for several years.

"Mining activities at Buzwagi will end at the third quarter of this year, but other activities will continue. We will begin processing activities of stockpiles of our materials for two to three years," he said in a telephone interview. Buzwagi is an open-pit mining operation and the smallest of Acacia Mining’s three gold producing mines. Commercial production commenced in 2009 and in 2013, mine life was shortened following a decision to suspend a final cut-back of the open pit.

Based on existing reserves, mining activity is expected to cease this year, followed by stockpile processing until 2020. Acacia Mining reported a massive £710m loss after writing down the value of its assets due to a dispute with the government of Tanzania, but has cut costs to ‘remain competitive’ in 2018.

It scrapped its 2017 dividend and announced that it will slash its gold production in 2018 up to 43 per cent as its Buzwagi mine transitions to processing stockpiles while Bulyanhulu, whose operations have been scaled down, exclusively re-processes tailings