Benedict Peters

The claim from the camp of Benedict Peters, a Nigerian oil entrepreneur, is that his newly founded mining firm, Bravura Holdings, is interested in mining lithium and rare earth minerals. There’s also an interest in cobalt in the Congo, copper in Zambia, gold in Ghana, as well as iron ore in Guinea. That doesn’t sound like a strategy, that sounds like buying the sweet shop when perhaps a bag of sherbet lemons might suffice. Oh, and platinum.

The reason for including Peters in this year’s Rainmakers and Potstirrers is to highlight the interest high platinum group metals (PGMs) is generating for Zimbabwe. South Africa, where enormous reserves exist, has impossibly high barriers to entry, whereas Zimbabwe, with its tin-pot economics, is a crapshoot of note. Bravura - aptly aspirational as it alludes to virtuoso levels of skills - has set $1bn aside for a platinum mine and smelter on a 3,000 hectare property in the Selous region, some 70km from Harare, according to a Bloomberg report. We are sceptical, but feel it’s a noteworthy gloss on PGM market enthusiasm.

Lionel Mhlanga, Bravura’s country manager, makes it seem like a doddle, actually: “From where we are now, we will go to resource definition, after that we will go to resource modelling, after mine development and then mine construction”. We are prepared to be proven wrong, but surely the best avenue to PGM production growth in Zimbabwe would be organically driven from the likes of Impala Platinum and Anglo American Platinum?