South African tycoon Mzi Khumalo risks losing his gold mines

South African tycoon Mzi Khumalo is at risk of losing control of the Zimbabwean gold mines he has owned for more than two decades, after a £53.2 million, or about $70 million, payment owed for the assets went unsettled, Africa Intelligence reported.

The money is the purchase price for Bulawayo Mining Company, which owns How Mine near Bulawayo and the Mazowe and Redwing mines. Greenstone Corp., a company linked to Khumalo’s family, bought it in 2024 from Metallon Corp., Khumalo’s former gold company, which is in administration in the UK.

The deal was structured so that Greenstone itself owes nothing. Khumalo and the Southern SelliBen Trust, set up for the benefit of his family, agreed to pay the price as guarantors. In its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April, Greenstone’s successor, Nasdaq-listed Namib Minerals, said that the price “to date has not been satisfied” and warned that a claim could seek to cancel the sale or force the company to pay.

Shares on the line

To secure the debt, the trust signed a deed in July 2025 assigning 4.9% of Namib Minerals to Metallon’s administrators. Under the deed, the security becomes enforceable if the money owed to Metallon is not paid, or Metallon’s administration is not discharged, by June 5, 2026, followed by a 30-day period to put things right. That deadline has passed. Billionaires.Africa found no filing or report showing that the administrators have moved to enforce it.

The trust held 63.7% of Namib Minerals after the listing, plus rights to as many as 21 million additional shares if performance targets are met. Khumalo, the trust’s settlor, has no voting or investment power over those shares, according to filings. Namib’s chief executive and chairman, Tulani Sikwila, a former Metallon chief, is one of the trust company’s four directors.

Khumalo also held shares directly. He sold 4.89 million of them between August 2025 and February 2026 at an average of about $3.46 each, and in June the trust lent him 4 million shares, according to an August filing that listed his address in Geneva.

The stakes are smaller than they once were. Namib’s shares traded at about $1.12 last week, giving the company a market value of about $64 million, less than the price owed for the mines.

Gold miner under pressure

Namib Minerals went public in June 2025 through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VI, a US blank-check company. Revenue rose 40% to $50.8 million in the first half of 2026, but the company ended June with $1.8 million in cash and a working capital deficit of $42.9 million, and cut its full-year production forecast to between 26,500 and 27,000 ounces. An expanded processing plant at How Mine finished commissioning on Oct. 9.

How Mine, discovered in 1941, has produced about 1.8 million ounces of gold. It accounted for the 11,373 ounces Namib reported in the first half. Namib is fighting a renewed application to place Mazowe under corporate rescue in Zimbabwe’s courts.

From Robben Island to gold

Khumalo, 70, served 12 years on Robben Island for his role in the African National Congress’s armed struggle against apartheid before his release in 1990. He became one of South Africa’s first prominent Black mining financiers, taking control of Johannesburg Consolidated Investment in the late 1990s.

He bought Lonmin’s Zimbabwe gold assets for $15.5 million in 2002 and built Metallon into one of the country’s largest gold producers, at its peak mining about 100,000 ounces a year. The business later sank under debts of about $200 million, unpaid power bills and wage arrears, and entered corporate rescue in Zimbabwe in 2019. Shamva Mine was sold in 2020 to a company linked to Kudakwashe Tagwirei, the tycoon who was sworn in as a Zimbabwean cabinet minister on Oct. 12.