Zambia plans to invite bids to explore for oil within six months in the hope of capitalising on what it says is “huge potential” to strike black gold beneath the soil of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Already Africa’s biggest copper producer, Zambia’s parliament has approved a legal framework for exploration and the government has held preliminary talks with oil companies ”mainly in Europe and some in Africa”, Kalombo Mwansa told the Financial Times late last year in his last interview as mining minister before switching to home affairs in a new government.