The United Republic of Tanzania’s Deputy Minister for Minerals, Dr Stevenn Kiruswa, has praised the Federal Government for providing intervention funds to artisanal and small-scale miners.
In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sidelines of the recently concluded three-day Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit in Abuja, Kiruswa expressed his gratitude.
“What I learned from the summit is that the Nigerian government has put in place a framework and funds to support its local miners, which is encouraging, and I applaud the government for doing so.”
“We will also encourage our local financial institutions to provide loans to our small-scale miners, who account for 30% of our mining revenue.”
“We also learnt from the summit that Nigeria invested a lot on large scale mining, we in Tanzania have been dealing on small scale mining,” he said.
However, he said that Tanzania had put in place policy and framework to ensure no mineral leaves the country without value addition.
He said that African countries had been loosing lots of bye products from raw minerals to the developed countries.
“We have put in place corporate social responsibilities; we have a policy that no investor mining in Tanzania should import staff to our country but should rather engage local manpower.”
He said that Tanzania had commenced a big project on exploration on strategic minerals that could be used for electric car batteries as alternative means to fossile fuel.
“We have big deposit of lithium in our country; we have copper, gold, Tanzanite and among others that we are currently exploring.”
He said that the country had placed restriction on “Tanzanite mineral” as the mineral could only be found in Tanzania.
The mineral could only be found in northern Tanzania and is used to make ornaments. It is one of the rarest gemstones on earth.
Kiruswa said that the summit was an eye-opener, adding that lessons and experiences learnt would be replicated in Tanzania.
He called on mining investors to take the advantage of minerals available in the country and invest in Tanzania.
