Don’t freak out

Last week I emailed Klaus to ask him about the state of affairs at Manono given that regional tensions are rising.

Here is his email:

Atlas_J,

Never heard about anything??? We are working as usual. These reports surface since 15 years but never have seen a rebel neither in the north and south........

I guess NGO groups also need funding ........

Regards

Klaus

Similar sentiment from ML last week (although I do admit it is highly unlikely ML would ever say anything negative). I have a screenshot of my conversation with him from Twitter but I can’t figure out how to attach it to this post on my iPad

ML: China 100% confident on Katanga region. 0 impact on AVZ project or China majors. Katanga Province works very closely with the China Govt & military for security and stability. These regions are a long way from AVZ. DRC is a massive country.

Finally, doubters should have a look at Alphamin, a Canadian mining firm that is developing a tin mine in Kivu province, north east DRC. Kivu is rebel central and is the place where most of these “DRC is a hell-scape” stories have come from over the years. Yet Alphamin was able to raise $200 million from insto’s just recently to continue developing their project. Not to mention that the DRC gov has recognised the value of their asset and deployed a sizeable military force to protect the mine while it is in development. The distance between Kivu and Manono is roughly 1000km.

Manono is a long long way from the trouble areas. I recommend people use the google maps measure distance feature to see what kind of distances were talking here. The closest reported trouble I could find was about 450km away, which is equivalent to distance between Melbourne and Canberra.

By no means is DRC great, but it’s not entirely post-apocalyptic either. Stuff gets done in the DRC, and Klaus has the experience necessary to enable that to happen. AVZ’s joint ownership with the Gov and Dathomir mean that we have the resources to continue development no matter what happens. To be honest, even if the government collapsed (highly unlikely imo), Chinese corps have the networks necessary to keep operating without much of a hang up. Mining accounts for over 2/3 of DRC’s GDP, they aren’t going to kill the golden goose on a whim.

In short, I’m not worried.