The company had a change of heart after President Hakainde Hichilema won a landslide victory in elections last year, pledging to boost growth and repair relations with mining companies.
“He is a breath of fresh air,” Barrick’s chief executive Mark Bristow said after meeting Hichilema on Monday, as part of the Indaba mining conference happening this week in South Africa. “Zambia is a good story.”
The miner is also searching for copper projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it has its giant Kibali gold mine, despite Bristow openly and frequently criticizing the country’s government and its revision of the mining code in 2018.
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But Barrick knows the value of exploring the central African copperbelt, an area straddling the border of Zambia and the DRC that is home to some of the world’s richest deposits.
“We’ve tried to invest both in…
