Ghana did not double its royalties because of the gold price
When Ghana's Minerals Commission said in January it would scrap long-term stability agreements and lift gold royalties from a flat five per cent onto a sliding scale reaching 12 per cent above $4,500 an ounce, in force since March, most coverage reached for the obvious conclusion, that bullion is near record levels and governments are taking their share.
The commission's then-acting chief executive gave a different reason: companies, he said, had used revenue from Ghana to buy mines elsewhere while avoiding basic obligations, and renewal would be conditional.
That is a judgement about character rather than a fiscal calculation, delivered by an official who expected it to be popular, and working out why it was popular is more useful than modelling the royalty curve.
The pattern is wider than one gold price
Ghana is one entry in a lengthening list. Mali raised the state's equity entitlement to as much as 35 per cent and its top royalty rate to 10 per cent, and the dispute that followed put Barrick's Loulo-Gounkoto complex under provisional administration and four employees in detention before they reached a settlement in November 2025. Niger revoked the agreements of three companies in March 2026, having seized a thousand tonnes of uranium from SOMAIR. Burkina Faso has legislated for a 15 per cent state stake.
Elsewhere the same instinct takes different forms. The Democratic Republic of Congo banned cobalt exports in early 2025 and replaced the ban with quotas. Indonesia's nickel export ban drew downstream investment other governments now study. China imposed rare earth export controls in October 2025, suspended them a month later and left the machinery standing.
Each measure rests on the same proposition, that the resource is too important to be left to the company holding it. Western governments courting miners with permits and public money are acting on the same proposition.
The critical minerals moment has been read as vindication after years of being treated as a problem. Strategy documents, streamlined permitting and public money have followed, and the temptation is to conclude the argument is won. The difficulty with support won on security grounds is that it comes from governments rather than populations, creates no constituency to defend a company when governments change, and points both ways at once.
What decides the direction is whether enough people believe the company is a net contributor to the country. A miner regarded that way is politically expensive to squeeze, while one seen as extracting value and moving it offshore is cheap, and a finance ministry under pressure knows the difference.
The Ghanaian quote is instructive because it argued about conduct rather than money, and it resonated because enough Ghanaians already believed it. When Afrobarometer asked Ghanaians in 2022 whether the benefits of natural resource extraction outweighed its costs, half said costs were greater and 39 per cent took the industry's side.
Social licence was designed for the fence line
Social licence, as the sector practises it, assumes the problem is local, something the community nearest the pit grants or withholds.
Resource nationalism arrives in the capital rather than at the fence line, argued before a national audience that will never visit the site, and a community programme, however good, offers no protection. The sector's own surveys have said so for years, with environmental and social issues overtaking licence to operate as the leading risk by 2022, and licence to operate ranked fifth for 2026.
When a minister's adviser or a journalist wants a quick account of what a company has done in a country, the answer increasingly comes from an AI assistant rather than a file or a phone call. Those systems are built from public, readable and widely cited material, and for most mining companies that account was written by people who oppose them.
A company's own version sits in sustainability reporting produced for investors and auditors, long, heavily caveated and rarely linked to. The summary reaching the people who set royalty rates is drawn largely from one side, at the point where it carries fiscal consequences.
Three things worth doing before the next code is drafted
The first is to measure standing at national level rather than around the asset and track it like any other political risk. Most can describe sentiment in the nearest town in detail and almost nothing reliable about their standing in the capital, where fiscal terms are decided.
The second is to publish the record in the open, in language a non-specialist will read. Tax paid, local procurement, employment, training and rehabilitation answer the accusation Ghana's commission made, and work only if they can be found and understood outside the sector.
The third is to establish what AI assistants say about the company in each jurisdiction where it holds a licence. The answer is testable, varies by country, and forms part of the political risk profile.
The sector has spent this cycle winning the argument with governments. It has not spent the same effort on the people those governments answer to, and the bill is arriving in royalty schedules, state equity stakes and revoked agreements.
