Minerals Commission is drafting wage, tender floors for mining contractors, official says

The Minerals Commission is developing ‌minimum wage and tender benchmarks for contract mining firms, seeking to curb aggressive underbidding as the country pushes miners to outsource more operations to local contractors, a senior official said on Thursday. Ghana, Africa’s top gold producer, in January 2025 ordered miners to shift surface operations — blasting, loading, hauling, and dumping — to Ghanaian-owned contractors, and underground operations to joint ventures with at least 50% local ownership by December 31, or face sanctions. ⁠ It is consistent with a broader push by Africa’s resource-rich nations to try to retain more value from ​their mineral wealth. But Ghanaian mine workers have spoken out against the directive, saying contractors offer lower pay and weaker ​job security.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Ben Birch-Mensah, director of local content at the Minerals Commission, the national regulator, said officials wanted to ensure that workers’ pay and conditions would not suffer. “The regulator does not want people to ​be worse off under contract mining,” Birch-Mensah said. “We are putting together a baseline so that contract miners ​cannot pay employees below a certain threshold. ” OFFICIALS TRY TO CURB UNDERBIDDING Birch-Mensah said the commission was also preparing minimum tender benchmarks ‌to prevent ⁠contractors from bidding below sustainable levels. He said that in some cases aggressive underbidding had left contractors unable to meet operating costs and that a committee would be set up to work out the details of the policy. Many firms had voluntarily outsourced mining operations before Ghana’s rules in January 2025, requiring miners to switch ​to contract mining. Birch-Mensah said ​the December 2026 compliance ⁠for local contractors “is…