Contract Mining Directive: How Minerals Commission’s push for local content is creating working poor in mining towns in Ghana

For years, Ghana's mining communities have lived the classic resource curse. Gold is mined in Tarkwa, Obuasi and Kenyasi, but human rights abuses, environmental destruction, loss of livelihoods, health hazards and social decay are what residents say they get in return.

The one exception that sustained these towns was not corporate social responsibility. It was the payslip of the permanent mineworker. That payslip paid the PAYE that funds District Assemblies. It paid SSNIT. It built the markets, the rental houses, and the shops.

That foundation is now being dismantled not by mining companies alone, but by a directive from the state's own regulator, the Minerals Commission.

Between October 2025 and January 2026, the Minerals Commission issued letters to the last three major companies still practising owner-mining, Newmont, AngloGold Ashanti and Chinese-owned Zijin Mining, ordering them to transition fully from owner-mining to contract mining by December 2026 or face sanctions including fines and mine shutdowns.

The directive is enforced under the Minerals and Mining (Local Content and Local Participation) Regulations, 2020 (L.I. 2431). Surface mining must go to wholly Ghanaian-owned firms; underground mining to firms with at least 50% local ownership.

Chief Executive Isaac Tandoh defends it philosophically: “Employment is not the same as ownership. Labour is not the same as control. Our people are working in the mines, agree, but do they own the mines?”

But the workers who actually risk their lives underground say they were never consulted.

According to the Ghana Mineworkers’ Union (GMWU) of TUC Ghana, which represents about 14,000 workers in large-scale mining, the sector has already undergone a silent casualisation.

As of the end of 2024, more than 90% of workers were on fixed-term and casual employment, while permanent employment accounted for less than 10%.

By 2026, the union says, that figure has climbed above 95%, meaning nineteen out of every twenty mineworkers are on short-term, casual or contract arrangements.

The GMWU's August 20, 2026 petition to Lands and Natural Resources Minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah is blunt: the contract model is “dangerous, regressive, and economically unsound”.

Its study with finance journalist Adnan Adams Mohammed found that when workers move from owner-mining to contractor, wages fall by at least half for the same job. Internal contractor staff confirm contractor workers typically earn around 50% less in basic pay than direct employees of mine operators.

Gbana says the loss is wider: lower PAYE, reduced pension contributions, and diminished retirement benefits.

“This is not what we intended for local content regulation. This is a complete reversal of what the intentions were,” GMWU General Secretary Abdul-Moomin Gbana told journalists after presenting the petition. “We are totally opposed to the directive.

“Local content must therefore create opportunities for all Ghanaians. It cannot become a vehicle for exploitation to enrich a few contractors at the expense of the workers who risk and sweat day and night in the bowels of the earth to produce the wealth,” the petition states.

“The attempt to impose a blanket transition raises serious questions about the true beneficiaries of this policy, as the so-called ‘local’ contractors being positioned as beneficiaries of this directive have consistently failed in their most basic legal and moral obligations not just to workers but also to the Republic,” Gbana wrote in his April 23 letter to the Commission.

In that same letter, he warned: “We wish to state therefore, without hesitation, that this path is injurious and inimical to the already fragile and precarious conditions of mineworkers. It will inevitably open the floodgates to further exploitation, abuse, casualisation of labour, and the erosion of hard-won protections that workers have fought for over decades”.

The economics explain the human cost. Data compiled by the Minerals Commission itself shows operational contract rates have plummeted by over 17% as local contractors undercut each other to win concessions.

The Commission now admits it. Chief Executive Isaac Tandoh said: “We have observed instances where mining service rates have fallen significantly... from $3 per tonne to below $2.50, leaving workers worse off”.

Yet its solution is to tighten contractor oversight, not suspend the directive.

The union says oversight has failed before. It cites Engineers & Planners, held up by government as a model local contractor, which the GMWU says has refused to meet statutory obligations, including SSNIT contributions and Tier 2 pension payments accrued over multiple years. Other contractors named include E&P, Rabotec, BCM, Electrochem and Rocksure.

The GMWU is particularly concerned about labour brokers, especially in some Chinese-owned operations, whom it accuses of commodifying labour and subjecting even mining engineers, geologists and metallurgists to precarious conditions.

The GMWU says it first wrote to the Minerals Commission on April 23, 2026, after the directive. A meeting on May 26 produced a roadmap to suspend it and form a Technical Committee. That roadmap has stalled.

No public cost-benefit analysis has been released on the impact on PAYE, SSNIT, Tier 2, community spending, and safety.

“We want to restate that the Ghana Mineworkers’ Union and its over 14,000 members reject the commission’s directive in its current form and are broadly unhappy with the severe labour crises that the current unilateral and lopsided local content regulation, as well as the Minerals Commission’s rampant administrative directives, have imposed on mineworkers,” the petition states.

Beginning September 1, the union has threatened industrial action, including wearing red armbands across all mines: “It is about bread and butter, and we can’t sit aloof,” Gbana said.

The central question remains unanswered by the Minerals Commission: How does creating a class of working poor in Tarkwa, Obuasi and Kenyasi maximise optimal national benefit from Ghana's gold?

Until that question is answered, the GMWU's demand stands: suspend the directive and put workers at the centre of policy.