Ghanaian billionaire Ibrahim Mahama's gold mine doubles full-time staff to 426

Ghanaian tycoon Ibrahim Mahama's Damang gold mine has more than doubled its permanent workforce in the six months since his company took it over from Gold Fields Ltd., even as the airport he promised to build there within that time remains at the earthworks stage.

The mine now has 426 full-time employees, up from 207 it inherited from Gold Fields Ghana in April, Joseph Nana Ansah Banful, the mine's people manager, said at a community forum in Tarkwa-Damang broadcast on Asempa FM, a Ghanaian radio station. The total includes 120 workers who had been on labour-hire contracts and were moved onto the permanent payroll.

"Upon taking over the mine, in the first month, we moved 120 employees from labour hire to the mainstream," Banful said.

Only one of the full-time staff is an expatriate, and about 62% come from the 10 communities around the mine, above the 60% local hiring target the company set at the handover. Counting contractors, about 2,300 people work at Damang. The company expects permanent staff to pass 500 by the end of the year.

Mining volumes climb

Mahama's Engineers and Planners, a Ghanaian mining contractor he founded and runs as chief executive, took control of Damang on April 18 after the government declined to renew Gold Fields' lease and put the mine out to a tender open only to Ghanaian-owned companies. The purchase was backed by a $205 million syndicated loan arranged by Stanbic Bank Ghana and Standard Bank of South Africa.

Monthly mining volumes rose from 1.4 million tonnes in May to 3 million tonnes in September, bringing the total moved since the takeover to about 11.1 million tonnes, according to the company. Frank Dankyi Agyei, the mine's manager in charge of mining, said freshly mined material now makes up 60% of what goes through the processing plant.

He rejected claims in the area that the new owners were simply processing ore stockpiled under Gold Fields. "Claims that we are only treating existing stockpiles are absolutely false," Agyei said. Active mining is under way at the Amoanda and Juno pits, where the company has deployed large Liebherr and Hitachi excavators, and an expansion is planned at the Rex pits.

The company is repairing 12 dump trucks brought from Tarkwa for use at Damang and expects another 28 Caterpillar 785 haul trucks. It aims to run the mine at higher capacity by the middle of 2027. Damang has sold its gold to the Ghana Gold Board, the state body that buys and exports the country's gold. The company has not disclosed how many ounces it has produced.

Airport deadline passes

The airport is moving more slowly. At the April handover ceremony, Mahama, the younger brother of President John Mahama, told residents that "within six months, Damang will have an airport, such that we can fly to Accra easily." That deadline passed on Oct. 18.

The plan has since grown from a simple airstrip into a runway about two kilometres long, designed to take Boeing 737 and 787 aircraft, Ramy Oboro, the mine's community relations manager, said last week. The first phase, levelling the site, has been slowed by hard rock. The second will add buildings, equipment and electrical and signal systems.

"The airport construction is anticipated to cost us not less than US$80 million for both Phase One and Phase Two," Oboro said. Farmers near the site are to be compensated and moved, though the company has not said how many are affected or how much they will be paid.

Chiefs in the area have praised the new owners for keeping the workers they inherited and starting work on the road from Damang to Subri, part of a planned route to Cape Coast.

Mahama is also fighting Gold Fields over money. E&P, which still holds the mining contract at Gold Fields' larger Tarkwa mine, is pursuing about $740 million in arbitration over what it says was underpayment for its work at Tarkwa and Damang. Gold Fields rejects the claims. In July, an investor in a separate gold project in northern Ghana accused E&P of espionage in a fight for control of that project, which E&P denies.