Despite Covid-19 Kigali continues to court mining investors with help of Tony Blair Institute

摘要

After publishing a lengthy document setting out the potential of twenty mining sites still available in Rwanda in mid-March, just a few days before Paul Kagame's government put the whole nation into lockdown on the 22nd to contain the spread of Covid-19, the Rwanda Mines Petroleum and Gas Board (RMB) has had to react quickly to achieve its aims, namely to attract investors. The publication of the printed version of mining opportunities, prepared by the RMB in conjunction with Raj Singh, a consultant from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change who has been working with this coordinating body for Rwanda's extractive industries since 2018 (Africa Intelligence, 18/12/18), was originally to have been followed by a series of business meetings abroad. Although the coronavirus pandemic has put paid to these plans, the RMB, which is run by Francis Gatare, has been continuing to prospect for investors. Its director of mining extraction and processing, Donat Nsengumuremyi, has been talking directly online with individual and firms in search of projects, and some are understood to have expressed an interest in certain sites. The majority of the concessions up for grabs contain "3T" traces (tin, tantalum and tungsten), though some also hold out the promise of gold and precious stones.