SA Tycoon Mzi Khumalo Risks Losing Zimbabwe Gold Mines Over $70m Unpaid Debt
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 failing to pay a $70 million purchase price for the assets.
The money is owed for Bulawayo Mining Company, which owns How Mine near Bulawayo and the Mazowe and Redwing mines. The company was bought in 2024 by Greenstone Corp., a company linked to Khumalo’s family, from Metallon Corp., Khumalo’s former gold group which is in administration in the United Kingdom.
According to a report by Africa Intelligence, the deal was structured so that Greenstone itself owes nothing. Instead, Khumalo and the Southern SelliBen Trust, a family 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, admitted 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.
To secure the debt, the trust signed a deed in July 2025 assigning 4.9 percent 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 grace period. That deadline has now passed.
Billionaires.Africa said it had found no filing or report showing that the administrators have moved to enforce the security.
The trust held 63.7 percent of Namib Minerals after the listing, plus rights to as many as 21 million additional shares if performance targets are met. Filings show Khumalo, the trust’s settlor, has no voting or investment power over those shares. 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 shares 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 now worth less than the debt. Namib’s shares traded at about $1.12 last week, giving the company a market value of about $64 million, less than the $70 million owed for the mines.
Namib Minerals went public in June 2025 through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VI, a US blank-check company. Revenue rose 40 percent 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. It has cut its full-year production forecast to between 26,500 and 27,000 ounces
An expanded processing plant at How Mine finished commissioning on October 9. How Mine, discovered in 1941, has produced about 1.8 million ounces of gold. It accounted for 11,373 ounces in the first half of this year. The company is also fighting a renewed application to place Mazowe under corporate rescue in Zimbabwe’s courts.
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 collapsed 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 October 12.