Nyanzaga is not new. Its first gold anomalies were scratched into field notebooks when many of today’s Mwanza university students were not yet born. In the mid-1990s, when gold fever was sweeping the Lake Victoria Greenstone Belt, Nyanzaga was just another set of promising trenches on Sukumaland soils. A quarter of a century later, the same ridges now host survey stakes for a half-billion-dollar mine.
What lies between those trenches and today’s Final Investment Decision is not just a geological journey, but a corporate and political relay. Four distinct sets of hands have held Nyanzaga, each reflecting a different era of Tanzania’s mining story. Juniors with more ambition than capital. Multinationals juggling global portfolios. A small ASX company brave enough to test new laws. And finally, a mid-tier African producer with a strong cash flow and appetite to expand.
Tracing this relay is not nostalgia; it is instruction. It shows how geology is constant, but politics, law, and corporate appetite are the variables. Nyanzaga’s history is Tanzania’s mining history in microcosm.
First sighting: the 1990s
The story begins with Sub-Saharan Resources, a small Australian explorer drawn to the Lake Victoria Goldfields during the boom sparked by Geita and Bulyanhulu. In partnership with Anglovaal Mining of South Africa, it scratched trenches, ran soil surveys, and logged promising anomalies at a prospect then dubbed Tusker.
The geology was clear early: broad zones of stockwork veining and sulphides in Archean sediments, the kind of architecture that produces prominent, If low-grade, gold deposits. But the timing was cruel. Gold prices languished through the late 1990s, and juniors lacked the capital to push multi-million-ounce discoveries into mines. Nyanzaga, despite promise, remained a series of drill cores in wooden sheds.
Yet this first act was critical. It proved Nyanzaga was not a figment of geochemical anomalies; it was a real deposit, large enough to attract majors, but too capital-hungry for the first generation of juniors.
The Barrick / African Barrick era (2000s–2014)
The second act belonged to the majors. Barrick Gold entered, later spinning its African assets into African Barrick Gold (ABG). With capital and rigs, they drilled deep, expanding Nyanzaga into a resource that by 2012 surpassed 4.6 million ounces. Nyanzaga was branded internally as the “next mine” in the company’s Lake Victoria cluster.
And yet, it never crossed the threshold. ABG faced headwinds, including declining grades at Bulyanhulu, cost blowouts at North Mara, and, above all, bruising disputes with the Tanzanian government over taxes and royalties. In that environment, Nyanzaga slipped down the priority list. The ounces were real, but shareholder pressure to fix existing operating mines, rather than sink billions into new builds, prevailed.
The lesson of this era is sobering. Even when geology is banked, corporate strategy and political climate can consign a deposit to limbo. Nyanzaga became a line item in ABG’s resource statements, but not a shovel in the ground.
OreCorp’s gamble (2015–2021)
The third act opened in 2015, when a little-known Australian junior, OreCorp Ltd, struck a deal with Acacia Mining (Barrick’s rebranded African arm). The structure was bold: OreCorp would fund drilling and a Definitive Feasibility Study in exchange for majority control. It was a high-wire act for a company with a market cap in the tens of millions, eyeing a project needing over half a billion in capex.
OreCorp drilled, refined models, and by 2017 published a new JORC resource that converted millions of ounces to Indicated status. But the real test came that same year, when Tanzania rewrote its mining laws. A mandatory 16% state free-carry, higher royalties, and stringent local-content rules scared off many investors. OreCorp leaned in instead. It recalibrated models, filed an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, and pushed for a Special Mining Licence under the new regime.
Against odds, OreCorp succeeded. In December 2021, it secured SML 653/2021, the first licence granted under the 2017 reforms. That milestone proved two things: Nyanzaga could navigate Tanzania’s harder rules, and juniors could still achieve major regulatory wins. Yet the elephant remained: OreCorp could not fund US$500m alone. The project was technically ready, but financially stranded, awaiting a new owner with deeper pockets.
The takeover battles (2023–2024)
If OreCorp had proven Nyanzaga could be permitted, it had also proven the limits of a junior’s balance sheet. A Definitive Feasibility Study is one thing; raising US$500m in equity and debt is another. By 2023, the project was a jewel sitting on the table, waiting for suitors.
The first to move was Silvercorp Metals, a Canadian-Chinese producer better known for its silver-lead mines in Henan. Its offer to acquire OreCorp in August 2023 was pitched as a clean solution: cash upfront plus scrip, giving OreCorp shareholders exposure to a diversified portfolio. The Tanzanian government gave cautious blessing; any well-capitalised owner was preferable to a stranded junior.
But Silvercorp’s bid exposed fault lines. Its operating record was mostly Chinese, not African. Its capital looked sound, but its credibility in the region was thin. Into that gap stepped Perseus Mining, an African mid-tier with mines in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and a track record of building on time and on budget. In early 2024, Perseus began quietly buying OreCorp shares, rising to a blocking stake. By March it launched a counter-offer, slightly richer in price but far stronger in credibility.
The result was decisive. Silvercorp withdrew in March 2024; Perseus rolled up the register and by May had delisted OreCorp from the ASX. For the first time in its life, Nyanzaga had an owner with both the technical team and financial muscle to build.
Perseus and the Final Investment Decision (2024–2025)
With OreCorp folded into its portfolio, Perseus wasted little time. The company revisited the 2022 DFS, scrapped the hybrid underground option, and simplified the mine plan to a single, larger pit feeding a 5 Mtpa CIL plant. The update carried a price tag of US$523m, but delivered clarity: 11 years of reserves, ~200,000 ounces per year, and simpler execution.
On 28 April 2025, Perseus’s board gave the Final Investment Decision. The announcement was not just a corporate milestone; it was a political moment. Tanzania now had a major new mine under construction, the first since the mid-2000s. In August 2025, Perseus and the Government of Tanzania signed an Addendum to the 2021 agreements, lifting the state’s stake to 20% and clarifying governance. The optics were deliberate: a foreign investor and the Tanzanian state side by side, promising “win-win.”
Construction was already visible. Lycopodium, hired as EPCM contractor, was mobilised; long-lead orders were placed; RAP houses were being built. For the first time since those trenches in the 1990s, Nyanzaga was no longer a line in a resource table, it was a mine in the making.
What the relay teaches us
Nyanzaga’s relay from Sub-Sahara to Perseus teaches three layered lessons.
- Corporate: Juniors discover, majors bulk resources, mid-tiers build. Sub-Sahara proved geology, Barrick proved scale, OreCorp proved permits, Perseus will prove production. Each handoff reflects capacity as much as strategy.
- Policy: Tanzania’s mining regime has moved through three phases: investor-driven in the 1990s, resource nationalist in 2017, and compact-driven by 2021. Nyanzaga embodies all three.
- Community: Local patience is long, but not infinite. Villagers have watched rigs, heard promises, and endured years of waiting. For them, the story only matters once jobs, houses, and livelihoods materialise.
The throughline is clear: geology is constant, but governance determines whether ore becomes ounces. Nyanzaga’s odyssey is East Africa’s mining arc in miniature, ambition, delay, reform, and finally execution.
A project as mirror and measure
Nyanzaga’s odyssey, from Sub-Sahara’s trenches in the 1990s, through Barrick’s drill campaigns, OreCorp’s permit battles, to Perseus’s boardroom FID in 2025, is more than a mining chronology. It is a mirror of Tanzania’s mining identity and a measure of its institutional maturity.
The mirror shows three eras. In the 1990s, Tanzania invited juniors and majors with generous terms; geology was abundant, but the state was peripheral. By 2017, the pendulum had swung, sovereignty was reasserted through free-carry stakes, higher royalties, and a new nationalism. Nyanzaga nearly became a casualty of that swing. The 2021 licence grant, however, suggested a third phase: compact-driven partnership, where investors accept state equity and communities demand ESG credibility, and in return projects gain predictability.
The measure is this: can Tanzania now take a discovery-to-production cycle that once stretched over 25 years and compress it into a disciplined, modern build? Nyanzaga is the first large-scale test. If Perseus and the Government deliver ounces by 2027, with households resettled fairly and Lake Victoria safeguarded, then Tanzania’s mining story will enter a new chapter, one where geology, governance, and capital finally align.
But if delays mount, if resettlement falters, or if political appetite shifts back to resource nationalism, the narrative risks relapse. Nyanzaga is thus not just Perseus’s bet; it is Tanzania’s wager on its own credibility.
For Tanzania Digest readers, the lesson is plain. Mines are never just about rock. They are about institutions, agreements, and patience. Nyanzaga’s long march is proof that geology waits, but investors and communities do not. The challenge now is to ensure that this project, three decades in gestation, becomes not just another pit on a map, but a durable symbol that Tanzania can build mines the 21st-century way: shared, accountable, and on time.
