Africa

First listed on the AIM in 1997, with a market capitalisation of £10 million, Petra Diamonds has since grown into a leading independent diamond mining group and an important supplier of rough diamonds to the international market.

Mr Teke, who is non-executive director at Optimum Coal, replaces out-going president Mark Cutifani. Other appointments announced at the Chamber’s 123rd Annual General Meeting included Khanyisile Kweyama, executive director of Anglo American South Africa, being made first vice president and Graham Briggs, CEO of Harmony Gold, being made second vice president.

With its stable, multi-party parliamentary democracy and an economy buoyed by strong agricultural, tourism and mining sectors, Namibia has a lot going for it as a nation. This fact was reaffirmed this year when Bloomberg named Namibia the top emerging market economy in Africa and the 13th best in the world.

Sharing its borders with the Kalahari Desert and the South Atlantic Ocean, Namibia is one of the youngest countries in Africa and as such enjoys vast potential for future prosperity. Since gaining independence in March 1990, Namibia has successful transitioned into a multiparty democracy with an estimated annual GDP per capita of $5,828.

Founded in 1992 by sisters Caron and Elaine Harris, FATS (the initials stand for Forwarding African Transport Services) has been built up from nothing to become a R200 million services company and a major player in the South African freight forwarding industry.

Mining operations rely on their equipment, and there’s no doubt that each site has a lot of moving parts in its conveyors, trucks, shovels, milling and grinding trains, not to mention its associated drilling programmes. All of this has to be nursed and protected with the right oils and greases. As any operations manager knows, lubricants can be a big budget item and one that pays back in proportion to its contribution to things like frequency of maintenance, equipment life and the avoidance of running problems that involve stopping the machine.

The diamond industry has been on something of a rollercoaster ride since the global financial crisis of 2008, with prices plummeting in 2008 and 2009, before rebounding to reach historically high levels in 2010 and 2011. This pattern of extremes was replicated in 2012, with retail sales of diamonds growing 1.8 percent from 2011 to $72.1 billion at the same time that overall prices for rough and polished diamonds declined by 14 percent and 13 percent respectively.

Since the early 1990s, the use of modern technology and refined models has seen gold exploration in Tanzania grow rapidly, in turn transforming the country into one of the fastest-emerging gold producers in Africa, behind only South Africa and Ghana. Yet despite the relatively recent expansion of the sector, the presence of gold beneath Tanzania has been known about since it was first discovered in the Geita region in the late 1800s.

“Base Resources Limited is pleased to advise the commencement of ore processing through the mining unit and wet concentrator at the Kwale Project. Following two weeks of water commissioning and control logic testing, the first ore from the central dune has now been taken through the dozer trap mining unit and the wet concentrator,” read a company statement.