thatrapsfan
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This is well worth the read a very interesting story.
Too long to post but I really recommend it. Really thought-provoking story of investment in Africa and all the issues that accompany it.
Continue here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/jeffrey-wrights-gold-mine.html?ref=magazine
Too long to post but I really recommend it. Really thought-provoking story of investment in Africa and all the issues that accompany it.
This is a relationship that could bring us all the things we desire,” Jeffrey Wright said. He was sitting with Samuel Jibila under an awning rigged from rusty metal sheets in front of Jibila’s decrepit house in Sierra Leone. Jibila is the traditional ruler — the paramount chief — of Penguia, a little domain of jungly hills and dusty villages 250 miles from the capital. Wright is an actor who lives in Brooklyn. He has won a Tony, an Emmy and a Golden Globe and most recently appeared as Beetee in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” And for the last decade, he has been traveling to this isolated area near the Guinea border to run his small gold-exploration company, Taia Lion Resources. He wanted to maintain Jibila’s faith in his company, in his plans, but Jibila, who was surrounded by lesser chiefs in glossy robes, wasn’t feeling faithful.
Since 2003, Wright has brought in geologists to sample Penguia’s soil and streams. He leases the exploration rights here from the national government. The gold deposits at the site he and Jibila were discussing may be worth billions of dollars. He says that mining will be a boon to everyone; that the operation will put many hundreds of people to work, not counting the small shops and other businesses that will bloom; that company employees will have a real chance to rise; that paved roads will replace cratered tracks. Transformation will come to a territory so undeveloped that when the rare vehicle needs to cross a river not far from Jibila’s home, the driver pulls onto a raft and ferrymen tug the vessel across with a rope.
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Wright and Samuel Jibila take a walk during a break in their meeting. Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum, for The New York Times
Wright has called himself a “son of the soil,” a child of the continent. He also calls himself a “radical capitalist” and casts himself as a kind of savior. Between 2 percent and 3 percent of Taia’s operating expenses go to the community. In addition, Wright has done something rare and perhaps unique among Western mining outfits in the third world: Penguia will have a minor ownership stake in the company.
But despite this vision and these promises, no metamorphosis has come to Penguia. Taia has accomplished no serious excavation, no construction of a pitside facility to process raw gold into bullion bars for export. The company has spent about $12 million on securing claims, sampling sites and just keeping itself afloat in Sierra Leone. Two years ago, Taia paid to grade a stretch of Penguia’s dirt roads, but it is already rutted and overgrown. Company operations are at a standstill. Overall revenue has been zero. Wright is backed by a range of investors — from friends to a mining sector analyst to Tiffany & Company, which has put in several million dollars — and he has poured in more than a million of his own. But he hasn’t been able to raise enough to actually get the gold out of the ground.
Last April, while Wright — whose softly padded, malleable features help him inhabit an array of roles — met with Jibila and Penguia’s dignitaries on the paramount chief’s porch, a scattering of young men and women from the chiefdom worked less than two miles away amid hand-dug pits and tunnels, engulfed by dense forest. The men piled rock and gravel into buckets; the women hauled the pails away on their heads. On the banks of a creek, the women pounded the stones with bigger rocks and then washed the shards on scraps of animal skin or carpet, searching for flecks of gold to sell in a distant town to Sierra Leonean or Lebanese middlemen who deal in pinch-size bits.
These laborers toiled for themselves; they had no link to Taia, though they were working on the parcel that Taia leases from the government. Their painstaking method is known as artisanal, as opposed to large-scale, mining. It goes on regardless of the paperwork the company signed in the capital, Freetown. Wright allows this low-level chaos for now, until major mining gets underway. It garners the diggers and washers a better living than most Sierra Leoneans make, which is less than $1.25 a day, but it can’t provide anything like the economic revolution that Wright has predicted if he can mine there.
What Wright longed for was a partner to finance the final phases of exploration and then sink $200 million into unearthing and refining the gold. He explained to Jibila that he believed he had found just such a company, that a delegation from one of the world’s biggest gold-mining outfits — which asked not to be named because negotiations were in progress — was due to visit in two days.
Continue here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/jeffrey-wrights-gold-mine.html?ref=magazine
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