Kaboko Mining (ASX:KAB) have signed an agreement with Innovative Mining to secure a 51% interest in that company’s neighbouring exploration License. CEO Tokkas van Heerden provides an overview of the acquisition and what it adds to Kaboko’s portfolio.We’ve done exploration on about 10% of our tenement at the moment and we’ve seen that it follows a seam that’s expanding to the northern section. It was necessary for us to secure our longevity of our project and to secure this area to the north of ourselves, so we have bought into Innovative Mining and we are starting to do normal exploration on that area, is just simple standards to just plot outcrops. But we will extend our mining operation to the northern section.
How do you plan to advance the expanded portfolio?The operation will be very easy to incorporate into our current operation because it’sadjacent, so the processing of everything will be at the same site. It is just to extend the basically strip and excavation, blasting and hauling, which is easy because it is the neighbouring tenement.Capital is easy as well because there no massive capital input to do this.
How will this additional land affect production and mining plans?Well it won’t affect us immediately. It will defiantly have a positive effect on the growth of our production and as we prove our logistical avenues, we will be able to dwell on these areas to increase our capacity and increase our volumes.
Kaboko appears to be building a substantial operation in Zambia, how is your company engaging with the local communities to ensure they are supportive of your operations?Well the tenement of the local land is the Chiefs are the owners of the land, so you have to have a very good relation with them. And we’ve maintained a very good relation. We have been engaging with them to ask them to identify possible employees for us to use at the mine. We’ve also contracted some of these people to manufacture bricks for our development ourselves. Together with a charity that we have, we are looking at building a school in that region specifically where there is no school for younger kids. So we are happy, they are happy with us and we are happy with them at the moment.
You have as a “partner” in your operations global trading company Noble Group, how key are they to advancing your projects?Any small mining company need a bigger brother. It’s just impossible to do what we do without a bigger partner. And Noble is key to this because we need to sell our product to them and the off take is pretty secure with them. And if we want to expand and it makes a good business case they will always be happy to fund. So in the expansion, it’s just a numbers game. If it all works out, they will do that and they are there that’s why we have entered into an agreement with them because we needed a bigger brother.
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