gold
25
07.13
Another aerial shot of the Mupane property showing the current tailings dam and (to the right of the photo) the Tau pit.
The results of Galane’s regional soil sampling within the Tati Greenstone Belt.
10 % expats and we have a training and localisation
programme in place to reduce this even further over
time with promotion on merit,” he says. “All of the
senior management up to and including CFO, Chief
Geologist and CEO are based in Francistown – it’s the
centre of our universe. We don’t believe in the ap-
proach adopted by many juniors of trying to manage
an African mining operation from offices in Toronto
or London or Perth. Mupane needs hands-on manage-
ment and that’s what we’re delivering.”
On the exploration side, Galane has made great
progress over the past 18 months and earlier this year
it issued a mineral resource update on its Tati Belt
properties. This defined a total measured and indi-
cated resource of 508 400 ounces of gold (including
a measured resource of 91 800 ounces within the
Mupane slimes dump) and a total inferred mineral
resource of 261 000 ounces. Comments Charles By-
ron: “The point to notice here is that the resource –
excluding the Mupane slimes dump – has increased
by 17 600 ounces since our 2011 technical report de-
spite two years of depletion through ongoing mining
operations. It demonstrates very clearly our ability to
replace resources as we mine.”
Byron, who earned his BSc in geology from the
University of Natal, has lived in Botswana since the
mid-1980s and has unrivalled experience of the Tati
Greenstone Belt. He led the team which discovered
the Mupane deposit in the late 1990s and remained
involved with the project through to production and
beyond. He says that Galane’s tenements cover about
90 % of the Tati Belt and close on 100 % of the “in-
teresting parts”.
Among the prime prospects being evaluated by
Byron and his team is the Jim’s Luck deposit, which
will probably replace Golden Eagle when the mining
of the surface resource is completed. Located 25 km to
the east of the Mupane plant, Jim’s Luck – which has
