Pan African sets sights on commercial production at Elikhulu next year

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Pan African Resources’ will redeploy about 500 of its employees to the Elikhulu tailings retreatment project during its construction phase, group mineral resource manager Barry Naicker said on Friday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Geological Society of South Africa’s Gold Day meeting, on Friday, he told Mining Weekly Online that following commissioning, this number would drop to 50 permanent employees.

The miner earlier this month said it would seek to re-engage a number of retrenched employees from its Evander mine when site activities for the Elikhulu tailings project, in Mpumalanga, start, in an effort to reduce job losses.

Evander is to reduce its underground operation’s fixed cost base once mining restarts, with 30%, or 976, of the mine’s 2 400 employees having been retrenched at an estimated cost of R54-million. Mining activities were suspended in February to complete infrastructure-critical refurbishment and maintenance on Shafts 7 and 8.

Pan African explained that the retrenched personnel were designated as redundant in terms of meeting production targets, following a productivity and human capital assessment. A retrenchment agreement was reached with the National Union of Mineworkers on March 10.

Meanwhile, the company was now pursuing construction of Elikhulu, following a positive independent definitive feasibility study for facilities and infrastructure at the Evander mine to retreat gold plant tailings at a rate of one-million tonnes a month.

Naicker said the company hoped to break first ground in the third quarter of this year, reaching commercial production by the third quarter of 2018.