As storm clouds gather over South Africa's mining industry amid controversy over the Mining Charter, mining houses in the rest of Africa are between a rock and a hard place. Tanzania, Africa's fourth-largest gold producer, after South Africa, Ghana and Mali, is the latest country on the continent to read the riot act to mining companies. A similar trend of confrontation between mining companies and governments is playing out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The DRC is mulling an amendment of its mining code to reflect an increase in taxes on profits from 30% to 35%, an increase in the government's stake in new mining projects from 5% to 10%, and an increase in royalties from 2% to 3.5% for copper and cobalt. In 2015, Zambia had myriad challenges to its mining sector, among these threats of closure by copper producers after it increased mineral royalty taxation from 6% to 20%. The government has since reduced the tax threshold to 9% for opencast mines and 6% ...
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