Hereward Holland Nanakanak, South Sudan
Taking a break from the toil of digging, Leer Likuam sat on the edge of a shallow trench, puffed his pipe and boasted he once found a 200g gold nugget bigger than his thumb.
In Nanakanak, a village of stick huts in an area that has attracted hundreds of diggers since Sudan’s civil war ended in 2005, Likuam’s find would have been lucrative but unexceptional.
“Everything is luck,” he said through a translator. On an average day he might dig up six grams, worth about 1 200 South Sudanese pounds (R2 350), he said. “Some days you’re lucky.”
Word of Nanakanak’s riches has spread. In the capital Juba, international mining firms are lining up at the Ministry of Petroleum and Mining, aiming to get their hands on part of the vast, unexplored territory.
Officials say firms from China, Australia, the US, South Africa and other African countries plan to apply for licences when new mining laws are passed later this month.
After many delays, parliament is set to begin debate on the bill today.
The South voted to secede from Sudan, then Africa’s sixth-largest exporter of oil, in a referendum last year.
The new nation inherited three-quarters of oil output, but in January a row with Khartoum led it to shut down the industry whose receipts gave South Sudan 98 percent of its income.
Oil production is expected to restart in the next couple of weeks, reaching about 230 000 barrels a day by the end of the month, but in the meantime the government hopes to pass mining legislation that will formalise the industry.
“It will diversify the economy. The mining sector has great potential,” Petroleum and Mining Minister Stephen Dhieu Dau said.
Nobody knows the extent of South Sudan’s mineral reserves because the war prevented exploration. – Reuters