The ManicaPost
Abel Zhakata Senior Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company Private Limited has sent engineers to Belarus for training on the plant equipment it purchased from the eastern European country as the miner gears up for intensive conglomerate mining of the gems at Chiadzwa.
ZCDC chief executive officer, Dr Moris Mpofu, said the company’s best eight engineers were sent for rigorous training on repairing the machines.
“The engineers are expected back by end of this month and once they land here, they will impact the knowledge they acquired to their colleagues so that our entire team has a full understanding of the machinery we are using,” he said.
The miner has to date received 16 of the 52 machines it procured from Belarus under a $32 million Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe financing facility granted last year.
The equipment includes dump trucks and dozers.
“We are doing all this so as to have in place a vast maintenance system that will enable us to do away with unnecessary breakdowns that will affect production once we start conglomerate mining.”
Dr Mpofu said by end of September, the company would have received all the equipment it acquired.
“By September, everything that we bought will be here. However, we are not waiting for September to commission the machines. We shall do part commissioning. The equipment that arrived early is still being assembled and once it is ready for use we will hit the ground,” he said.
ZCDC is slowly doing away with contract mining which is costly.
Dr Mpofu said as soon as the miner starts operating on its own it would declare more dividends to Government as costs related to contract mining will significantly go down.
Conglomerate mining increases yield thresholds both qualitatively and quantitatively.
“We will get more refined gems that fetch higher prices unlike the industrial diamonds which we being mined through alluvial processes,” Dr Mpofu said.
