Every Friday morning, SAfm's AMLive's radio anchor Caesar Molebatsi speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday's At the Coalface transcript:

Molebatsi: Treasure troves again this morning, because one has been found untouched. Gold has emerged from beneath the skirt of the forgotten old Agnes mine in Mpumalanga.

Creamer: Our oldest mine in South Africa, a 127-year old mine in Mpumalanga and old-timers mined it many years ago and sort of went into a lull. It was bought recently by an auction to very astute South Africans, one is Peter Skeat, and he has been around the block when it comes to gold mining and he snapped up this asset.

Mainly, he wanted it for the surface materials, but then started to examine this and in reformulating your view of it, he has actually come up with a very valuable set of assets. He has got 21 orebodies there virtually untouched. Virtually virgin orebodies, because of the way it was mined in the past and the way he is going to do it now.

In the past people would be chasing high-grade in very narrow stopes and their whole concept was one of being small. Now he is building adits going into this compared to the tiny ones of the past where you can take massive big trucks in.

Instead of just looking and chasing high-grade he is going for all the grades, because there are halo-grades in terms of the mineralisation. He is hoping to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in the second week of August. He is raising funds as we speak and is flying to London at the weekend and will possibly go to the US. He has been around South Africa in 40 meetings and he is raising something like between R250-million to R400-million to turn this mine back to account.

Molebatsi: We hear that mining giant Rio Tinto is planning a massive new iron-ore mine in West Africa.

Creamer: Rio Tinto admits that it is under-invested in Africa. It is heavily invested in Australia and I think in the last ten years they spent something like $38-billion in Australia. Now it is turning its attention towards Africa, because it feels a big group global diversified miner must also have more investments in Africa. It is looking to West Africa and Guinea in particular.

This is a massive big mine that it is planning. They are hoping for 70-million tons exported of iron-ore a year from the outset. That timeframe is between three and five years. Despite all the obstacles there, tremendous logistical obstacles, he has brought in a Chinese partner, Chinalco, and they are planning to with the International Finance Corporation, build a 700-km rail line to the coast, also 20-km of tunnel and a port which is pretty shallow, so it is going to have to be dredged and rebuilt. None of that is stopping their ambition to go ahead with the Simandou project in Guinea. We have seen democratic elections in Guinea last week so it is mitigating the political risk.

Molebatsi: What about beneficiation? Are there any plans?

Creamer: Throughout Africa they are talking beneficiation. The Africans have woken up to this idea of adding value at home. Although the miners will want to just dig out the ore, put it on a train and get it to port and market, the government will says hang on, what are you going to do with this locally. We find that same common voice coming through throughout Africa.

Molebatsi: Africa is the region that is growing fastest out of the global recession.

Creamer: That is quite a shock. It is like the great time to market Africa as we come out of the World Cup. But, also there are very real statistics that you can look at to show that Africa has had a V-shaped recovery out of the recession.

They are talking about, in 2010, the economic growth rate in collective Africa will be 4,5% going to 5,5% in 2011 and then back to its level of 6% by 2012, that was the pre-meltdown level. The fastest growing area, it seems, is East Africa - Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania. The slowest, unfortunately, is Southern Africa plus a few Francophone States. The thing is to look at Africa as a whole where it will have 1,1-billion working-age people by 2040.

That is more than China and India will have, which is quite an astounding statistic. It is not only the African Development Bank which is raising its voice about the bullishness that people should have towards Africa, but it is also some very astute analysts. McKinsey has just put out a report which is very bullish about Africa and saying that the rate of return on foreign investment in Africa is higher then in any other developing region.

That is McKinsey and they do their sums very carefully. They also give you some hard statistics, like since 2000, 360-million Africans have signed up for mobile phones, that is more then the total population of the United States.

If you look at the collective GDP of Africa in 2008, that was $1,6-trillion, that is roughly equal to Brazil or Russia. We're starting collectively to be able to flex some muscles and collectively we also in 2009 the collective economy rose through the global recession by 1,4%

Molebatsi: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he'll be back with us at the same time next week.