While Lithium Beneficiation Advances, Zimbabwe's Chrome Sector Still Awaits Its Own Toll-Processing Model

[SMM Express] More than six weeks after Zimbabwe's Mines Minister Dr Polite Kambamura promised "very soon" to roll out targeted policy interventions for the chrome sector — including a toll-processing model allowing small-scale miners to process ore for a fee rather than sell it to foreign-owned smelters — chrome producers say they are still waiting. Speaking during a technical media tour of Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe in Goromonzi on 17 July, Kambamura highlighted lithium beneficiation as a policy success story, pointing to Zimbabwe's first locally produced lithium sulphate, exported from the Arcadia plant in April, alongside further lithium processing facilities under construction at Kamativi and Sinomine Bikita. Chrome, by contrast, came up in the same discussion as the sector where that model has yet to take hold for smaller producers.

Shelton Lucas, business development director at Naivo Mining — which operates chrome, antimony and tungsten projects in Mashava, Ngezi and Kadoma, and who also chairs the Chrome Miners Association of Zimbabwe — said his company remains unable to capture the value of its own raw chrome. "For our raw chrome, we are now forced to sell to local Chinese smelters where they underpay us," Lucas said, adding that unlike antimony, where he has the resources to build a value-addition plant, the cost of chrome processing infrastructure remains prohibitive. His comments echo concerns he raised in early June, when he described local buying prices for chrome ore — then around US$70 per tonne, against international CIF China values several times higher — as reflecting a "predatory price regime." At the time, Kambamura pointed to an existing MMCZ fund intended to capacitate small-scale chrome miners and said he would soon announce policy interventions, including toll processing through government-linked facilities such as ZimAlloys.

Zimbabwe's broader mining outlook remains strong: the Chamber of Mines projects 10% sector growth for 2026, with export earnings potentially reaching US$7.5–11 billion, and the Ministry has separately outlined plans for regional beneficiation hubs that would let chrome-producing areas specialize in ferrochrome and chromium alloys. But the gap between that national-level ambition and the lived experience of small-scale chrome producers, still selling raw ore to a limited pool of local smelter buyers more than six weeks after relief was first promised, illustrates a recurring theme in Zimbabwe's beneficiation drive: policy announcements and on-the-ground implementation are not always moving at the same pace, even as the government's own flagship example — lithium — demonstrates what a fully realized beneficiation pathway can look like.