DEAR READER: SINCE dropping Part 1 of the KoBold Mysteries, Financial Insight has made a series of staggering findings. We are managing the content, even as we recover from the shocks. These new discoveries have led to a slight rearrangement. The KoBold Mysteries shall now have—at the very least—a “Part 3.” Also note that we contacted KoBold Metals and invited them to comment on all these findings, and they graciously declined.
Previously on the KoBold Metals Saga:
IN PART 1 of this series, we saw a compelling set of announcements around a singularly remarkable discovery in Chililabombwe, Zambia. The announcements reverberated around the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), to delegates of the Investing in African Mining Indaba who received them with exuberant enthusiasm. However, back in Lusaka and the Copperbelt, the news had a lukewarm reception at best and, at worst, evoked outright, ferocious hostility.
The announcements at Mining Indaba 2024 were made by the President of the Republic of Zambia, His Excellency, Mr. Hakainde Hichilema, the Minister of Finance and National Planning, the Honourable Dr. Situmbeko Musokotwane, and the co-founder and President of KoBold Metals, Dr. Josh Goldman. They related to certain efforts by KoBold and ZCCM-IH; efforts which, by all accounts, have led to the apparent discovery of, most likely, the biggest deposit of copper ore in the history of Zambia, if not the world.
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In This Article
Today, Financial Insight can reveal the following astonishing findings:
1. The KoBold ‘discovery’ was not about finding ‘new copper ore;’ in fact, it was quite the opposite.
2. In the original article in the Financial Times—where the breaking news was released to the world—KoBold were exceptionally transparent and very categorical: they had used existing data as the foundation of their own discovery. In other words, KoBold actually utilised the very same, old mineral exploration survey results that have existed for decades.
3. Headlines on the pages of prominent media houses in Zambi’s mainstream had the effect of ‘distorting’ KoBold’s original announcement.
4. Because they focused on the wrong detail, most of Zambia’s media ended up ‘misleading’ the public.
5. Josh Goldman is a PhD in Physics, form Harvard University; so, he is actually Dr. Goldman.
Part Two
LET US BEGIN ‘Part 2’ of the KoBold Mysteries with a short thought experiment:
Imagine a great book, full of boundless, esoteric wisdom and knowledge, of which there exists only one copy. This book is so precious that it is considered priceless. Now imagine that the book, in the hands of a novice caretaker, is mistakenly fed into a shredding machine. Its pages are turned into a tangled mess of thin strips of paper. A more experienced caretaker, upon realising the grotesque error of his novice, collects the shreds and places them inside a bag for safe keeping. He hopes that one day, the twisted and contorted spaghetti junction could be unravelled and the book, with all its priceless knowledge, restored. Decades pass, and many try to piece the paper shreds together, but inevitably, all fail miserably.
I end this parable with a question… As the bag sits on the shelf, collecting dust in the storeroom, does the knowledge and wisdom that the book once contained still exist inside that dark, dusty space?
While you ponder that question, let us return to the KoBold tales…
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A Media Lost in Translation
At the heart of the KoBold mystery lies the very nature of what they found. Chililabombwe, in the core of Zambia’s Copperbelt, has been a renowned copper mining area for over 70 years, boasting some of the world’s highest-grade copper deposits. The existence of a good grade copper orebody in the Ming’omba area has been the stuff of folklore in those locales, going back decades. Tales of phenomenal copper riches under the Ming’omba earth are an accompanying soundtrack to the yearnings of a community desperately in need of more employment and more commercial activity.
Unfortunately, when Zambia’s mainstream media reported the KoBold news, use of the word ‘discovery’ mistakenly implied ‘finding something completely new.’
This leads us to the first bombshell: The investigative wings of Financial Insight have since unearthed evidence that the news circulating in Zambia’s media was a ‘distortion.’ In fairness to KoBold, and to President Hichilema and Dr. Musokotwane, at no point did any of them ever claim that KoBold had found new, previously unknown copper ore. The original article by the Financial Times—the same article that Dr. Musokotwane directed the Mining Indaba fraternity to check with for confirmation of the news—contained completely different content than what ended up strewn around Zambia’s social media gossip pages. The reader is encouraged to corroborate this by reading the original Financial Times article. The reader will find that, rather than claim to have discovered new copper ore, KoBold, in fact, did the exact opposite.
The KoBold announcement got lost in translation because Mwebantu and other prominent, mainstream media outlets merely posted sensational headlines without providing context to what the headlines meant, nor content about the actual nature of the find. The phrase ‘KoBold used Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ got bandied around repeatedly, but no-one offered to explain exactly what the AI had done.
If Zambia’s prominent, mainstream media outlets had done proper justice to the KoBold content, or done the most basic research, it would have become patently obvious that ‘discovery’ did not mean ‘we found new copper where no one knew there was copper before.’ The KoBold ‘discovery’ was about something at once related yet starkly different from a discovery of new copper, and at Financial Insight, we believe it to have been equally monumental.
Drilling Into the Unknown
The root of the KoBold controversy, as the Zambian public perceived it to be, can be traced to the nature of mineral exploration. Any exploration engineer will tell you that this is a tricky and inexact science. You can drill at one location and find very good ore; drill several fields-lengths away and find absolutely nothing. Before KoBold strode onto the scene, numerous exploration surveys had been conducted near, in and around Ming’omba, as they had in many other parts of the country. This is the source of the public outcry; an outpouring of dissonance to the suggestion that KoBold were first players in the Ming’omba exploration game. On this score, the public was right; KoBold were not the first entity to explore around Ming’omba, which is why those with knowledge of previous explorations responded so feverishly to the Mwebantu post.
“Exploration is where babies come from,” KoBold said to the Financial Times. “You can help babies grow but you’ve got to get the birth rate up. That’s the hardest part: how do you find things [like copper ore] in the first place?” In asking this question, KoBold was referring to the phenomenon called ‘geological uncertainty,’ a phenomenon that has kept Ming’omba in a stranglehold for more than half a century.
Geological uncertainty is the bottleneck that plagues many an exploration project. The primary objective of any exploration expedition is to resolve that uncertainty. The resolution of geological uncertainly should result in a definition of the structure of the earth underneath the surface, including the size, nature and extent of any mineral ore. Any exploration project must also provide an answer to a simple yes-or-no question: ‘Is the ore discovered in the exploration of such size, grade and structure as to result in a commercially viable mining enterprise?’
Our findings indicate that the numerous explorations conducted in prior years and decades around Ming’omba had failed to resolve the geological uncertainties of the site. Therefore, although it was known that there was copper in the area, no-one knew precisely where all of it lay, or how much of it there was. No one knew the size, structural extent and shape of the orebody to such a degree of confidence that a viable mining operation could be commissioned with predictable yields. Past explorations had yielded datasets—numerous datasets we might add—that suggested something interesting existed around Ming’omba. Many survey results had evidence of good grade copper ore at specific points. However, those previous explorations individually and collectively failed to resolve the geological uncertainly to any high-quality outcomes that could result in a positive answer to the yes-or-no question: ‘to mine, or not to mine.’ The volume of data that existed was colossal, but it was just that—data. Unfortunately, dear reader, data is not information.
Thus, in spite of a remarkable amount of exploration data having been gathered about and round Ming’omba over many years, there has never been a conclusive treatise of those data, leading to elimination of geological uncertainty sufficiently to result in a commercially bankable business plan for a mining operation at Ming’omba. This is not to say there was no copper; it is evident that there was. Engineers simply could not be sure exactly where and how it lay under the earth’s surface. At the very least, no one was sure enough to make a compelling business case out of the data.
And so, the years rolled on and on, with every attempt at the problem—using traditional, conventional methods—leading to the same conclusion: the level of uncertainty was too high to take Ming’omba to the bank. So, Ming’omba was stuck, and Zambia, stuck with it. Until one fateful day.
Enter Dr. Josh Goldman, with KoBold Metals in his wake, and with a US$150m wallet.
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Upon arrival, Josh is received by a wizened old caretaker, with a thin, hunched frame and a full shock of almost pure white hair. The old man leads Josh down a long, dark corridor to a closet. “I am the last of the caretakers,” he says, stretching out a trembling hand to open a creaky old door. “I placed this in here for safekeeping.” The hand retrieves a bag; a bag that has lain there, all but forgotten, for decades. “Many have tried, and all have failed. But, I am told you have magical powers that can restore our Book of Knowledge and Wisdom.”
Josh receives the bag from the caretaker’s shaky hand and opens it to see a jumbled, contorted mess of thin strips of paper.
“I know exactly what to do,” says Josh. “Activate AI.”
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Stay tuned for ‘Part 3’, when we describe precisely what KoBold Metals and Dr. Josh Godman did, and #PrepareToBeAmazed.
So, Where Are We Going With This?
The purpose of the KoBold Mysteries series is to show the nation that prominent media houses in Zambia got this whole darn thing wrong, because they over-sensationalised the wrong details. We intend to show that the news itself was a moment of national success; not just for KoBold or the billionaires who back the company, but for Zambia as a whole.
We shall demonstrate how KoBold’s actual, initial announcement was a unifying one, embracing previous efforts around Ming’omba. We shall also show how a singularly unifying announcement and message got lost in translation in the mainstream media, with the consequential national outcry. We shall describe what KoBold actually did that led to their discovery, and how previous exploration efforts around Ming’omba were central to KoBold’s work. Then we shall explain what the discovery actually was, and why it qualifies to have the characterisation of ‘a discovery.’ And finally, we aim to explain how KoBold utilised Artificial Intelligence, leading to this remarkable outcome.
