Image credit: ZCDC (Facebook)
Company spokesperson Sugar Chagonda told Chat263 that the company will use proceeds from the diamond sales to address financial challenges facing the company.
"We have been optimistic in our outlook and we have resumed diamond sales so we are actively addressing those constraints, we can safely say we are finally navigating out of the woods," he was quoted as saying.
Zimbabwe had said last July that it had a diamond stockpile of over 1 million carats.
The Minerals and Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) managing director Tongai Muzenda said at the time that they were expecting to rake in up to $100 million from the sale of the diamond stockpile.
Meanwhile, operations at ZCDC had allegedly stopped as workers were demanding payment of their salary arrears and supply of food.
Chagonda downplayed the strike but admitted that the company had failed to pay workers due to the disturbance of the global diamond value chain.
"That we had problems paying our salary arrears is no secret, its fact that we have been updating the workers on the challenges that we had which were emanating from COVID-19 challenges," he said.
"These challenges are not peculiar to ZCDC but have been felt across the whole sector, it's a situation that we are addressing actively."
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
