Goldleaf Mining

South Sudan has potential mineral resources but are not mapped properly or quantified. The government has been trying to promote South Sudan as a mining destination to attract foreign investors. We only have artisanal and small-scale gold mining production going on in various states of our country, this is not enough to fund the budget for development like the oil revenue can. Recently, some companies have expressed their desire to replicate what the DRC did some years ago where mineral rights were issued to a consortium of Chinese companies in exchange for infrastructural development. The literature is out there to show how this scheme works and what success or failures of such schemes. Here we toyed with the same idea of oil for road projects which ended with mixed results. There are discussions in the tea places with the desire to entice the US government to replicate what they are currently doing in the DRC, many think that if South Sudan can offer mineral resources to the US companies through mineral diplomacy, then the Trump administration might give this a consideration and allow the US mining companies to invest in the mining industry here. But what are these minerals that can attract the US or the Chinese companies? Certainly the US companies will not come here to mine gold, there is gold everywhere including in jurisdictions that are far much attractive then South Sudan. The superpowers are looking for critical minerals and Rare Earth Elements (REEs): lithium, copper, cobalt, graphite among others. Do we have these minerals in South Sudan? Yes and No, but the best answer is, we don’t actually know. Why is that? South Sudan must invest in an integrated geological mapping and survey to identify and somehow quantify various types of mineral occurrences within our borders. This is an expensive undertaking but necessary requiring a budget of about $180 million to map the best mineralized zones of our country. Who should map the resources? This is more of a political decision than a technical one. You have the Chinese or the US geological survey, the British geological survey that can do this work. But remember the country you give the opportunity to map the resources will have a critical mineral data, which impacts the awards to exploit this resources. It must be handled with care. South Sudan must allocate the resources to map the country’s minerals first before we could actually attract credible investors that can actually participate in the minerals for infrastructure projects. Anything short of this will be speculative and might not achieve the desired outcome.