Dr Stevenn Kiruswa, the Deputy Minister for Minerals, the United Republic of Tanzania, has commended the Federal Government for supporting Artisanal and Small Scale Miners with intervention funds.
Kiruswa, gave the commendation in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sideline of the just concluded three days Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit in Abuja.
“What I learnt from the summit is that Nigeria government had put in place framework and funds to support its local miners, this is encouraging and I want to commend the government.
“We will also encourage our local financial institutions to give loan to our small scale miners that generate 30 per cent of income we get from the mining industry.
“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. (NAN)
