By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 07
Policy convenes a pivot; operators sustain it. At Uis the operators are already on site.
A mining pivot is only as real as the people asked to run it. Andrada’s move from tin toward battery metals at Uis rests on a management team and a workforce already on site, now asked to carry a more complicated operation. The leadership steering that shift has done versions of it before.
The public face is chief executive Anthony Viljoen, but the story that matters is broader: a founder-operator with a track record, a plant workforce built over several years, and offtake and joint-venture partners whose commitments turn a drill result into a business.
The chief executive carrying the pivot
Viljoen is not new to building African mining companies. With more than two decades in the sector, he was the founding chief executive of Australian-listed Lemur Resources and a co-founder of Bushveld Minerals, experience that runs to raising capital and standing up operations rather than only running them once built.
That background fits the task at Uis, which is less about discovery than about execution: financing an upgrade, managing offtake and coordinating production while a new metal is added to the mix. The pivot needs an operator comfortable with capital markets and plant construction alike.
The job at Uis is execution, and it is being run by a builder of mining companies.
From tin producer to polymetallic operator
The company has already changed shape once. Since 2022 Andrada has roughly doubled tin output at Uis and brought tantalum to commercial production, so the lithium ambition is an extension of a proven habit of adding metals rather than a leap into the unknown. Each new product has tested the same plant and people.
That record is the profile’s strongest evidence. An operator that has already turned one mineral into two has shown it can absorb a third, which is a more grounded claim than a first-time developer promising to do it.
A team that added tantalum to tin has earned the benefit of the doubt on lithium.
The operators and the community
The workforce is the quieter half of the story. Since taking over Uis, Andrada reports creating about 400 jobs and investing roughly N$1.5 billion (about US$83 million) into the Uis community, building the operating base that any expansion depends on. A plant runs on the people who have already learned it.
Those operators carry knowledge no briefing holds: which circuits foul, which suppliers deliver, and how the site behaves through a hot season. Folding lithium into an existing operation borrows that experience rather than rebuilding it, which is why an operating mine beats a plan on paper.
The strongest asset in the pivot is a workforce that already knows the plant.
What the operators must hold
Sustaining the shift needs partners as well as staff. SQM’s earn-in funds the lithium exploration, and offtake relationships turn concentrate into revenue, so leadership here is distributed across a chief executive, a plant team and a set of outside commitments that all have to hold together.
The measure of the operators will be continuity. A year on, the question is not who announced the lithium results but who is still running the plant, meeting the offtake and keeping the community investment paying. Execution, not the announcement, is the real profile.
Leadership at Uis is measured in who is still operating once the headlines fade.
For a partner, financier or acquirer weighing Uis, the real investment case is the operators: a founder-chief executive who has built mining companies before, a workforce that has already absorbed two metals, and partners whose commitments underpin the third. The decision is whether to back the team that must run the pivot daily, rather than the drill result that merely announced it.
Sources: The Namibian; Andrada leadership; Andrada Mining eyes expansion in Namibia (The Namibian)
