The information was forwarded to the Lusa agency by Ferrangol administrator, Henrique Kiaku, on the sidelines of the announcement of the results of the public tender for the granting of mining rights for the prospection and exploration of diamonds, iron and phosphates.
Henrique Kiaku said that the exploration contract was signed in November last year between the State and the Turkish group, and at this stage the office works are underway.
“We are doing‘ due diligence ’for all the information that the past company has left. Despite covid-19, the hired technicians continue to work on this information ”, he said.
According to the official, “the operation for a mining project, before, needs a construction phase, but what investors are committed to is, in a first phase, to reevaluate the existing information”.
“We remember that the project has been stopped since 2014/15, it is necessary to look at the existing information. The positive side is that we have already started to rehabilitate some infrastructures, some houses that will be able to accommodate technicians and we will continue to work, prepare studies, so that based on them we can make a clear schedule of when operations can start ” , he said.
Asked if the situation of the current covid-19 pandemic is affecting the project, the administrator of Ferrangol, concessionaires for metallic mineral resources, admitted that “indirectly” yes, “due to the impossibility of travel, but once the airspace is open can be minimized ”.
The exploration contract for the Cassinga integrated iron and steel extraction project is located in the municipality of Jamba, province of Huíla, about 350 kilometers east of Lubango, the provincial capital.
The Cassinga integrated project has the Cassinga and Cateruca mines, with a potential of 15 million tons of iron for a decade of exploration, in an annual order of 1.5 million tons.
Ferrangol data indicate that, between 1967 and 1975, the Mozambique Railways transported around 40 million tons of iron concentrate from Cassinga, an annual average of five million tons.
The peak of activity was recorded between 1974 and 1975, a period in which iron production reached a record of 5.5 million tons.
In the 1960s, the extraction of iron gained weight, after oil and diamonds, in the country's economy, reaching its peak in 1974, and then declining in 1975, the year of Angola's independence.
