Newmont Africa’s Ahafo South Mine says it is working around the clock to address speculative activities that delay the expansion of its Tailings Storage Facility (TSF) Project.
The mining company which operates the mine located at Kenyasi in the Ahafo Region has been battling speculators over the past three years.
However, the Manager of Communications and External Relations of Newmont Africa’s Ahafo South and North Mines, Samuel Osei assured: “For us at Newmont, we are committed to working within the regulatory framework or the legal framework to ensure that those impacted by our projects are adequately resettled”.
The company according to its senior officials noticed that their TSF was almost full, so they sought a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to relocate people within the catchment area of the project.
The communities within the project’s area are Donkyikrom, Yarogurima, Ananekrom, Oseiwusokrom and New and Old Daudakrom.
So, these people numbering thousands must be resettled by the mining giant which operates three mines in Ghana namely Newmont Ahafo South, Newmont Akyem and Ahafo North which is yet to start gold production.
Why relocation
The move is to make sure that if there is any impact the people do not suffer. So, the EPA asked Newmont Africa to resettle the people before it could embark on the TSF expansion project.
In 2019, the EPA assessed the tailings storage facility that Newmont Ahafo South was building. Tailings in simple terms are storage for the waste that a mining company generates when it processes the ore.
So, the company decided to expand the TSF to enable it to store more waste so that it could produce more ores to process for gold. Therefore, the communities that are closed to the TSF, per the minerals and law, must be resettled and compensated.
But the mining company must resettle the people who have structures and are living in them. For instance, if someone has a house, and that person is living in that house, the company will rebuild a house for that person somewhere else and move him or her.
Cut off date
The EPA directed the company to declare the cut-off date which was initially the 5th of July 2019 but was moved to the 9th of July 2019.
Cut-off date means that from that day all the properties in the project area, whether they are houses, farms and all that will not be increased. Nobody can’t build any more houses, and farms among others. They can’t extend their facilities.
So, what the company did was that it captured everything that was there with drone shots to cover all the properties that were there.
We have Google maps, we have everything just to make sure that when we are ready for compensation, we will compensate for the right properties and so on, senior officials said.
Immediately after the cut, the people got to know that there was going be resettlement, people were going to get new houses, money, and the rest, and others started building what mining industry watchers call speculative structures.
So, all kinds of buildings started springing up and these are essentially proof sheet-like structures. Like what the African Eye Report saw in the Ahafo North.
The speculative structures started springing up all over the place. People were building massively. However, per the Minerals and Mining Act, mining operator(s) can’t pay for buildings structures or properties that were established, erected, or built after the cut-off date.
Technically they are not supposed to get anything
So, technically they are not supposed to get anything. Because once the cut-off date is done or declared. It is the same as members of Journalists For Business Advocacy (JBA) witnessed in Ahafo North’s speculative activities.
But people built a lot in the Ahafo South mine. So, what happened was that Newmont Africa’s Ahafo South Mine officials and the community leaders went to Accra in June 2021 to sit down with the EPA to address these issues at the Alisa Hotel.
The EPA assessed the issues and said the owners of the speculative structures do not deserve any compensation. Because there is enough evidence to prove that all the rest structures were not there before the cut-off date.
Accra meeting to address the issues
At the meeting, the EPA said in the interest of peace (again like the Ahafo North issue) Newmont Africa should try and give them a token.
At that meeting, it was even agreed that the token should be something that would discourage people from engaging in speculative activities in the future.
They will get some money alright, but it will be nothing to write home about. So that, they won’t get encouraged to engage in speculative activities in the future. The community members who engaged in the speculative activities agreed that they would take the token offered by Newmont.
As soon as they returned to their communities, they changed their position and said no way. They stated they would fight for full compensation exactly as those who were there would get.
The meeting at the Alisa was attended by the EPA, Newmont, the affected mining community members, chiefs, the DCE, the district police commander and leaders of the communities.
That was because this problem has been going on for so long since March 2020. It was delaying the extension project. They wanted clarification from the EPA on the issues. So, the EPA invited all of them to Accra for the meeting.
When the cut-off date of 5th July 2019 was declared the buildings and structures on the expansion area were few at that time, officials of Newmont Africa told a team of JBA members who visited the Dokyikrom-Tutuka community.
The structures both habitable and non-habitable Newmont recorded were over 800. The bone of contention now is some of the over 800 structures have been extended. “Just using the drone footage, we estimated that about 300 structures have been added that we haven’t even touched.
So, it is not just the addition, but those that existed once they were inventories, and we had the codes. They added those structures more to attract more money”.
Like you have a two-bedroom house and extend it to a four-bedroom house. The communities are also asking Newmont to extend the cut-off point limit to areas that the project doesn’t reach.
Speaking to the JBA and Ghana Chamber of Mines delegation, the community leaders were not happy with the turn of events in their communities.
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, back from Ahafo Region
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