Omega Ukama 
CALEDONIA Mining Corporation (Caledonia) says it is keen on reinvesting its cash flows into Zimbabwe, which it believes is underexplored and holds great potential.
This comes as the Zimbabwe focused miner is expecting ongoing expansion project at Blanket Mine, in which it holds a 64 percent stake, to increase its cash flows.
Maurice Mason, Caledonia’s corporate development executive, said the Toronto Exchange-listed miner was “actively looking at five or six investment opportunities at the moment”.
“Something that a lot of investors are not aware of is that Zimbabwe represents, in our view, probably the last gold frontier in Africa,” he said in an interview with British specialist financial public relations and investor relations agency, Blytheweigh.
“Over the past 20 to 40 years, there has been a lack of sufficient capital for exploration in Zimbabwe and also probably not the right exploration methods.
“So you’ve almost got a time capsule to back when gold was $250 per ounce and all that gold is still in the ground and we feel we have poll position to go after that and to explore,” he said.
This also comes investment into the country has generally been subdued over the years due to various political and economic reasons.
According to a World Investment Report released in 2018, Zimbabwe’s foreign direct investment inflows dropped 48,6 percent from $372 million in 2016 to $289 million in 2017.
A recent report by IH Securities, a local advisory firm, shows that international investors continued to shun Zimbabwe after the country earned a paltry US$470 million in foreign direct investment last year compared to Mozambique and Zambia, which raked in US$2,3 billion and $1,1 billion, respectively.
Caledonia says if the opportunities, which it is considering in the country, “come to fruition and the geologists are right”, it believes that there are several “multi-million ounce gold deposits at attractive rates” that it can bring to account.
“We have the people, the cash flow from a productive asset and the relationships in the country to make that happened,” Mason said.
In the same interview, Mark Learmonth, Caledonia’s chief financial officer, said the company’s production for 2018 was “more at the bottom end of production due to mining dilution as we move to a longhole stoping methodology”, which he said is meant to enhance safety for the workers.
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