Introduction

A mining title in Zimbabwe used to be a thing one owned. Like a house, like a parcel of land, like a debt instrument. One paid the fees, held the certificate, and the document was good against the world. What you did with it was a commercial question, not a legal one. The asset existed independently of the activity on the ground.

On 22 May 2026, that model died. The Ministry of Mines and Mining Development issued a Policy Statement reserving the small and medium-scale gold mining sector for indigenous Zimbabwean citizens and wholly Zimbabwean-owned entities. The reservation provisions in Section 1 — the foreign exit pathway, the January 2027 deadline — have dominated the commentary that has followed. The most consequential provision, however, sits four pages later. It is Section 6(b). It is fewer than fifty words. And it joins Zimbabwe to a quiet global trajectory, moving through Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia ,and Peru over the past two decades, in which the foundation of mining tenure is shifting from registration to performance.

The Provision That Re-writes Tenure

Section 6(b) provides that gold mining rights held by foreign investors “shall be secured and sustained on the basis of demonstrated production performance above the prescribed small-scale mining thresholds, as evidenced through verifiable proof of gold deliveries to Government through authorised gold buying and marketing channels.” Section 6(c) extends the same principle to any operator seeking additional claims, conditioning further pegging on “demonstrated productivity, operational performance, and effective utilisation of currently held mining locations.” Section 6(d) flags idle assets for follow-up review. The relevant thresholds are those in the Policy’s own definition of the reserved sector — monthly production up to 20 kg and/or capital investment up to US$15 million — but the Policy does not say how production is to be averaged, over what period, or how a temporary dip is treated. The test is quantified at its ceiling and undefined at its operating edge.

Read together, these provisions introduce a single new principle into Zimbabwean gold mining law: tenure is earned through production, and is conditioned on its continuation. This is not how mining tenure has been understood in this country. Under the Mines and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05], tenure has been a function of registration, payment, and statutory good standing. The title was the asset; the operations were a separate question. The Policy collapses that separation. The title is no longer freestanding. It is contingent on what is happening underground.

From Property Right to Use-Right

In substance, the policy inserts a production covenant into the regulatory perimeter of every gold mining title in the country. Production covenants are familiar instruments — they appear in petroleum production-sharing contracts, in concession agreements, in farm-out and tribute agreements between mining-title holders. What is new is their elevation from a private contractual term, negotiated between parties, to a public regulatory standard, applicable across the gold sector.

The verification mechanism is already built. Fidelity Gold Refinery delivery records are not new; their elevation to the evidence and arbiter of tenure is. The Refinery’s delivery ledger has just become the most important register in Zimbabwean gold mining.

A property right is robust against the world. A use-right is robust only to the extent that the holder uses it. For generations, mining titles in Zimbabwe have been spoken of and contracted around as if they were property rights — alienable, mortgageable, residually valuable. Section 6(b) dissolves that assumption. What you own, when you own a gold mining title in Zimbabwe today, is a conditional licence to extract.

The Mining-Finance Problem

Mining finance in Zimbabwe — whether through trade finance secured against gold off-take, asset-backed lending against equipment, or corporate facilities secured over title and shares — has rested on a simple underwriting premise. The title is good. The title can be sold. The title can be operated. The lender’s downside, in the limit, is the residual value of the title as a stand-alone asset.

Section 6(b) removes that floor. A title that is not producing is no longer simply a low-yielding asset; it is an asset whose tenure is, on the face of the policy, at risk. The implications ripple through the structure: due diligence shifts from title good-standing to production trajectory; covenants extend to maintenance of production above the relevant thresholds; events of default reach beyond debt service to regulatory-tenure risk; security valuation differentiates sharply between producing and pre-production assets.

The third-order consequence sits in the syndication market. International mining-finance facilities are routinely syndicated across multiple lenders and jurisdictions, with Zimbabwean exposure historically priced against country, off-take and title risk as separable inputs. Section 6(b) collapses two of these. Title risk and off-take risk now share a common register. Assets sitting above the production-performance band become marginally more securely tenured than the market is currently pricing them; assets below carry tenure risk they did not carry seven days ago.

Off-take as a Tenure Instrument

A subtler consequence sits in the off-take agreement. The verification mechanism in Section 6(b) — deliveries to the Fidelity Gold Refinery — collapses what mining finance has historically treated as separate risks. An off-take agreement that channels production through Fidelity is no longer merely a cash-flow instrument; it is a tenure-protective instrument, because it generates the very deliveries on which Section 6(b) compliance depends.

For a lender, this is structurally valuable. An off-take recorded in the Refinery’s delivery ledger is, from the regulator’s perspective, the proof of tenure under Section 6(b). Lenders who have already structured around Fidelity off-take sit closer to tenure protection than lenders whose security is title-only. This will reshape mining-finance practice. Off-take agreements that were once a secondary instrument become a primary tenure instrument.

Conclusion

The transition from registration tenure to performance tenure asks more of every party than any of them is currently delivering. Lenders must re-engineer documentation around an asset whose value floor has shifted. Sponsors must align production plans to a State-defined standard. Off-take counterparties must understand the regulatory weight their delivery records now carry. The State, in turn, must build the implementing instruments that translate the Policy Statement into operative law. Policy precedes practice; practice precedes documentation.

Performance is the new property. It has been arriving, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, for two decades. Days ago, in Harare, it arrived here. The mining title in Zimbabwe is no longer the document we have spoken of and contracted around for generations. It is something else. The work of mining capital, over the months ahead, is to learn what.