The struggle is real in the hot Savannah summers, when the farmer is expected to start planting and they cannot afford shop certified seeds. It was on a Friday morning when my friends and I, walk-in on a homestead deep in rural areas in Zimbabwe Midlands. Everybody seemed busy the mother sitting down selecting good corn seeds from a full sack of corn and the boys were crushing sunflower heads extracting the seeds, 3 rundown huts stood on a grey stone rock that resembled crumbs of a sample I was carrying. There was a sudden halt of activity as we emerged, from their faces they appeared to be startled and asking themselves, "where did these man come from and for what", we greeted them and they were so welcoming. Our mission was to ask if they had seen a beacon, with inscriptions 1930 and some letters. (Chemistry periodic table elements symbols). We ended up asking for water, for we were rightfully standing on top of the mineral. We toured the area the whole day, going further north the mineral was in super abundance and the stone proved to be an impendent, reducing arable land. It had been 6 years since I came to this area buying sugar beans and a boy, my tour guide mentioned of a small irregular structure with a plate on top in the bush ( A beacon). I told him it could be a discovery mark of a mineral but I knew over the 6 years no one from that area could have grown an interest to know more about the beacon.
This escapade made me reflect on a book by Conwell Russell, Acres of Diamonds. The book opens up, with a story of a rich farmer who was told by a priest that from where he comes from, a person got to have diamonds to be called rich, so he sold his farm and impoverished himself in pursuit to discover diamonds when they were right there is his farm. The buyer of his farm later discovered the diamonds in that same land, fine gems. The morality of the story was that, you can be rich from anywhere you are, Philadelphians needed not to travel to New York to be rich. Right there in Midlands, Zimbabwe, people are languishing in poverty but they are sitting on a mineral, waiting for someone to come and kick them off their land and start mining. I wish i had a loud speaker and say, "hey people wake up!, you a sitting on money" and there was going to be a rush, too bad I had interests to save.
Africa is pregnant with minerals, just buried there but we will languish in poverty if we choose to ignore it. Those unusual stones you daily see, it costs nothing to take them to a lab and get an analysis report on their composition. If you are seriously considering mining a prospectus license is purchased from government mines offices and you can go around examining your surrounding. Once you get a place with a mineral and you go further and register the claim, then the land is available to you to exhume the mineral. It hurts that if you approach banks today to get a loan, probably you won't get one because you don't have a collateral, but many multinationals with claims at our door steps, the claims have never been put to use for more than 3 decades and serve as collaterals with banks abroad, while back here we seem to be ignorant of the value of a claims. Its time we start to explore and go to the laboratories.
Extreme Value Mining, Explore to win
