Gold Mining:Cameroon suffers FCFA 1bln loss per month

In a recent mission report, the Traditional Mining Support Structure (Capam) reveals that the Cameroonian Treasury is losing approximately FCfa one billion every month, due to mining companies hiding the quantities of gold they produce.

“Production recorded by control agents represents only 32% of the real estimated minimum threshold of real production of mechanised companies, for their activity to be profitable for them", the report quoted by the Economic Daily indicates.

According to Capam, government programme aiming to canalise minerals produced in Cameroon towards formal systems, these conclusions result from"the calculation of production thresholds determined by operating site according to the content of gold, the capacity of production equipment, of the real level of activity on the ground...".

These conclusions reveal above all a concealment of the quantities of gold produced in the mine fields in the East and Adamaoua, and incidentally important losses in financial resources for the State, which taxes the mining companies according to declared production.

The above-mentioned report, on the basis of testimonies from the artisanal miners themselves, specifies that these concealments of quantities of gold produced in Cameroon are the consequence of "night washing sessions" initiated by certain mining companies, operations at the end of which the quantities of gold thus collected in the night are loaded towards unknown destinations.

Following a discovery just made by the mines squad in the area of Ndokayo, in the region of the East, a veil has been lifted on the means used by these mining operators to convey the cargoes of non-declared gold.

Indeed, at this checkpoint, the elements of the mines squad found sachets containing gold, hidden in domestic gas cylinders.

The attention of the elements of the brigade had been aroused, we learn, by the frenetic pace of exits and entries of gas cylinders on mining sites, the suspicious weight of these supposedly empty gas bottles leaving the site, and traces of welding observed on a significant number of bottles.

This discovery confirms official statistics on gold mining production in Cameroon according to which only 10% of the national production goes through the formal sector, the rest being snatched by traffickers, whose prices generally proposed to artisanal miners and other companies are more attractive.