World waking up to DRC riches: Marna Cloete
- 7 December 2024
Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 Mining Leader of the Year Marna Cloete believes the stunning success of the Kamoa-Kakula copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues to change global investor views of the jurisdiction and also the lives of local people who are now the driving force behind an industry that could one day be world leader.
The DRC’s annual copper production has surged by 1.5 million tonnes since 2015. Its yearly output still sits well behind dominant global source, Chile.
Kamoa-Kakula has, however, shifted the momentum of DRC copper mining and connected investment in major hydropower, rail transport and domestic downstream processing projects.
Lauded for her role in Ivanhoe’s growth since she started when the company had less than a dozen employees, Cloete was an accountant who started her career in PwC’s mining arm in South Africa and became a key figure in Ivanhoe’s progression from explorer into the ranks of the “world’s next major mining” companies on the back of the rich Kamoa-Kakula underground mines.
She has been Ivanhoe’s CFO for more than 10 years and president for over four years.
Ivanhoe founder and executive chair, Robert Friedland said at the Resourcing Tomorrow Outstanding Achievement Awards Cloete had led a team with senior operations executive Mark Farren that had “completely changed the way communities relate to a mine”.
“The software around the mine is much more important than the mine itself,” Friedland said.
“[Cloete] is inspirational for our women who are so fantastic in mining.
“But it really isn’t anything to do with men and women and identify, it has to do with the fact that a mine has to benefit the people around it.
“The industry has to reinvent itself … and Marna deserves this award.
“Thank you so much for the recognition of all the work she has done.”
Cloete said during Resourcing Tomorrow funding for mines and infrastructure in DRC that hadn’t been available when Ivanhoe and its partners, including the DRC government, were looking for billions to develop and scale Kamoa-Kakula was obtainable now.
Miners who had to be imported less than a generation ago were now being trained in-country and would have roles to play in mentoring people who would run DRC’s mines of the future.
“I think there has been a lot of progress since we originally had to go through trying to fund Kamoa-Kakula. We didn’t have many options available to us at the time,” Cloete said.
“If we were to make a discovery today – which we are in the process of doing adjacent to Kamoa-Kakula – we would have multiple options in terms of getting funders coming into these types of world-class orebodies because risk appetite across the globe has changed and people are starting to realise that critical metals are important to different jurisdictions.
“It’s a pity that the world didn’t wake up to this a couple of years ago.
“But I think we’re catching up and we’re catching up fast.
“What we’ve also recently done which was almost unheard of was raising local banking facilities for Kamoa-Kakula in the DRC. That wasn’t something that was possible a couple of years ago and I think the industry is waking up to this. It’s possible if you have these type of orebodies that can support that kind of debt. We have raised … close to $2b of facilities in the DRC which is an absolutely tremendous achievement I think.
“People will start looking at jurisdictions that were perceived as more risky in the past.
“We’re de-risking it through relationships.
“We spent a lot of time with government, taking them through the process for building a modern mine in-country.
“And we run investor tours for the government to show them what we do because you can’t expect a government that’s sitting thousands of kilometres away from where the action is to understand what you are doing on the ground if you don’t show them how it works and how the legislation that they’re implementing will impact your business.”
Cloete said Kamoa-Kakula employed state-of-the-art mining and processing equipment, and methods, in the middle of Africa. It had more than 6000 Congolese full-time employees.
“DRC is typically openpit mining but we do underground mining. We had to teach miners to do long-hole stoping,” she said.
“We’ve got world class training facilities and the people are sharp and they’re clever and eager to learn.
“We’ve got [training] simulators. We’ve built a university.
“You must have a can-do attitude. If you sit back and say it’s too risky, we’re not going to do it, and we should bring in people from Australia or Canada to come and mine in Africa because they know what they’re doing, you’re going to fail.
“You have to back the people.
“And you have to elevate the people and empower the people to deliver.
“We’re building the biggest [copper] smelter in Africa. It will be commissioned early next year. We’ve sent people to China and to Zambia to go and work on smelters for the past six months because our own people will be operating that smelter with a small contingent of expats.
“So it’s about how you approach things.
“Is it easy? It’s much easier to go and recruit … from Australia, or wherever, to go and do your mining. That’s easy. It’s one contract. It’s hard to educate people. It’s hard to build those facilities. It’s hard to do the skill transfer. But you must do it because that is what makes your mine in the long term sustainable.
“You have to uplift your community.”
