The next African play for Moab Minerals (ASX:MOM)

The mineral explorer Moab Minerals (ASX:MOM), may have taken its current name from the place in eastern Utah famous for its mountain biking trails, but for the last couple of years its focus has been Africa.

Last year, the company picked up a couple of uranium projects in Tanzania, one , called Manyoni, with an existing JORC 2004 mineral resource estimate, and more recently, entered into an agreement to acquire a new copper and gold project in Zambia called Sasare. The Manyoni and Sasare projects have the potential to be company makers, or at the very least to levitate Moab stock off the mid-2025 lows.

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Backing Zambia as it returns to copper greatness

Sasare, the acquisition of which was announced last month, is interesting to us because historically Zambia hasn’t attracted much interest from ASX juniors. That, however, has started to change. Under President Hakainde Hichilema, in office since 2021, Zambia has rolled out the red carpet for mining investors, and the country is now returning to being a strong producer of copper after years of decline for the industry. Indeed, the government plans to triple the size of the Zambian copper sector by 2032. In the meantime, virtually the whole country is underexplored, and that’s where companies like Moab can now come in to their own.

Historically Zambia was famous for its Copperbelt, in the western part of the country near the border with the DRC. Sasare is located in eastern Zambia around 430 km east-northeast of the Zambian capital of Lusaka, which lies in the middle of the country. That doesn’t mean the Sasare area is off the beaten minerals track. The 51 sq km project area, in which Moab is earning 80%, and which is prospective for ‘IOCG’ copper and gold exploration, hosts an historic conventional quartz vein gold mine called Sasare, which was worked from 1906 until 1942.

Moab’s geologists have a gold Exploration Target at Sasare of 31 to 41 million tonnes grading 0.8 to 1.7 g/t gold for 0.8 to 2.3 million contained ounces. As for copper, there’s exposed copper mineralisation at surface and some great copper intersections from previous operators. The copper Exploration Target is 14 to 106 million tonnes at 0.7% to 1.6% copper, containing somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 tonnes of copper.

Some great intersections at Sasare

If Sasare hosts is an IOCG deposit then shareholders could make out very well indeed. IOCG, you’ll recall, stands for Iron Oxide Copper Gold, the same type of deposit as BHP’s Olympic Dam in South Australia, as well as Prominent Hill and Carrapateena, the mines which created enormous shareholder value for Oz Minerals in the same region as Olympic Dam.

IOCG deposits are copper deposits that are hydrothermal in origin, where there is a high content of magnetite and/or haematite, with low titanium content, and, importantly, where there are economic levels of gold as well as enrichment of other elements. They’re often large. They can be easy to work, being mostly breccia and the feed material mostly sulphides. And the by-products such as such uranium can make for low effective production costs.

In the near term, the plan for Sasare is twofold. The company will do some initial mapping and soil sampling and also evaluate of the large historical database of drilling and geochemistry to choose drill targets. It’s likely that one of the early drilling efforts will be around the adits of the Sasare mine, to see if there are more gold-bearing sheeted quartz veins than those which were historically worked.

For copper, the aforementioned Exploration Target was developed around a prospect called Mweze where some great intersections were previously such as 52 metres at 2.72% copper were logged from surface in drilling, and 5 metres at 2.6% from 4 metres in trenching. That will be the focus of the early field work.

We think Sasare can help Moab re-rate off the 2025 share price lows given the current investor interest in copper and gold, particularly in Africa. However, the Manyoni Uranium Project in Tanzania could contribute to that re-rate as well.

Resurrecting an old uranium play

Manyoni sits in Singida Region of central Tanzania. It covers a uranium resource that had been identified by an ASX listed company called Uranex way back in 2010. At that time, Uranex declared a JORC 2004 resource of 20.5 million pounds of U₃O₈ at 147 ppm. In September 2025, Moab upgraded the Manyoni resource from JORC 2004 to JORC 2012 and it now sits at 27.2 million pounds of U₃O₈ at 136 ppm.

The location is great, only 100 kilometres northwest of the Tanzanian capital of Dodoma, and the jurisdiction is pretty good as well, with Tanzania having built a reputation for being mining friendly over the last four or five years. Importantly, the Manyoni deposit looks like it’s easy to work, with the mineralisation sitting in a flat lying paleochannel under only 3.0 metres of overburden. Moab is currently trying to acquire some more tenements related to Manyoni from anther ASX listed company called Auking which would further increase the scale of the project.

At the moment, Moab Minerals isn’t really on anyone’s radar screens, having picked up Manyoni in one of the worst markets for ASX junior explorers in living memory. As sentiment improves as we move into 2026, and investors return to the junior exploration space, we see multiple catalysts that could draw attention to the story. Put Moab Minerals on your watch list.