36 / 84
34
MODERN MINING
January 2017
Top projects
TIN
Dr Anselme Kitakya
(Provincial Minister
of Mines) laying the
cornerstone of the Logu
School (one of Alphamin’s
community projects) in the
presence of Marie Claire
Bangwene (Territorial
Administrator), Richard
Robinson (MD of ABM),
ABM’s legal adviser, and
Gilbert Kalinda (a leading
member of the Walikale
community).
Jamie Anderson, Alphamin’s
Exploration Manager, and
colleagues logging core.
resolved. Probably a bigger problem for the
project than access is the somewhat unstable
nature of North Kivu Province. The area is more
peaceful than it has been in the past but armed
groups still operate in the province and secu-
rity is potentially an issue.
Kamstra, however, is very positive. “The
narrative about North Kivu being lawless is
outdated,” he observes. “We’ve been on site at
Bisie for more than three years and haven’t had
too many problems. We acknowledge, of course,
that operating in North Kivu is not the same as
operating in some First World jurisdiction such
as Australia or Canada. But it is manageable
and the situation is constantly improving – and
will almost certainly improve further still when
we have a mine up and running.”
One of the reasons why Kamstra describes
the common perception of North Kivu as dated
is that there is no longer a significant artisanal
presence at Bisie – with the result that the ‘war-
lords’ who used to exploit the informal miners
have moved on.
“Artisanal mining at Bisie started to take
off in the early 2000s and the numbers on site
eventually peaked at around 16 000 people,”
he says. “In fact, Bisie reputedly had the high-
est density of satellite phones on earth. The
area was producing up to 4 % of the world’s
tin and there was an El Dorado quality about it.
But the bottom fell out of the market for Bisie’s
informal producers when the Dodd-Frank leg-
islation in the US in 2010 made it increasingly
difficult to sell any conflict minerals or metals,
including tin, at the same time as the artisanal
miners went through the water table. Today,
there only is only a small number of artisanals
left and none at all at our Mpama North site,
which is our current focus.”
Kamstra emphasises that Alphamin is a
member of the Conflict-Free Sourcing initia-
tive (CFSI) and says the mine’s product will
be entirely compliant with the Dodd-Frank
legislation. He also mentions that Alphamin
has strong backing from the DRC government,
which has a 5 % share in the Bisie project, and
South Africa’s IDC, which has invested US$10
million for a 14,25 % stake.
Alphamin has put a great deal of work into
forging relationships with communities in the
area. “We were not welcomed with open arms
initially,” Kamstra says. “So we decided to put a
community programme in place. We’ve elected
to spend 4 % of our in-country
expenditure on community initia-
tives, which is an easily auditable
number. We originally found it
difficult to determine who exactly
represents the communities we
interact with but after three years
we now know our way around
and our support on the ground is
growing strongly.”
Counter balancing the nega-
tives of operating in North
Kivu is the sheer quality of the
resource. Although the cassiter-
ite mineralisation in the area was
probably known to the Belgian
colonials, it has taken Alphamin
to delineate the magnitude of the
resource. The company has links
with Pangea Exploration (run by
South African explorationists Rob