A US$28 Billion Project. Ten Years Since the Lease Application. Zero Signatures on the Contract That Matters
Port Moresby will hear, again this year, that Wafi-Golpu is close. Prime Minister James Marape has said it before Sydney conferences, before Independence Day, before Parliament, and before the cameras at Davos. This time the venue is PNG Investment Week, 29 November to 2 December, at the International Convention Centre in Sydney. The Government wants to walk in with a signed Mine Development Contract and an issued Special Mining Lease in hand.
As of July 9, 2026, it has neither. What it has is a position paper sent nearly two years ago, a joint venture partner whose CEO says talks are “continuously” happening without a “favourable outcome,” and a Prime Minister who keeps setting deadlines the project keeps missing.
That gap between the announcement and the ink is the real story.
The Wafi-Golpu Numbers That Never Move
Wafi-Golpu is not a marginal deposit. It holds roughly 12 million ounces of gold and three million tonnes of copper in Morobe Province, based on the JORC-compliant Wafi-Golpu Technical Report (June 2022), a resource base large enough that Harmony Gold’s chief executive, Beyers Nel, has called it nearly half his company’s total mineral inventory.
The Framework Memorandum of Understanding signed in April 2023 promised Papua New Guinea 55% of total project economics across a life-of-mine value estimated at US$28 billion: 30% State equity through Kumul Mineral Holdings, a 3% royalty with no deductions, an additional 2% fiscal stability tax, and US$394 million earmarked by Newmont and Harmony for community infrastructure. On paper, it is one of the most lopsided resource deals PNG has negotiated in its favour in a generation.
On the ground, none of it exists yet. There is no signed Mine Development Contract. There is no issued Special Mining Lease. The clock that matters, the one that starts the 30-month window for Front End Engineering Design and a Final Investment Decision, has not started ticking.
A Decade Standing Still
The Wafi-Golpu Joint Venture lodged its Special Mining Lease application with the Mineral Resources Authority on August 25, 2016. Harmony Gold’s own reporting frames the broader deadlock at closer to 18 years, tracing back through the project’s earlier exploration and permitting phases. Either way, the arithmetic is brutal: a resource this size, this advanced, has been waiting longer than most PNG business leaders have held their current jobs.
The Framework MoU in April 2023 was billed as the breakthrough. It set the equity split: State 30%, Harmony 35%, Newmont 35%, with 10% of the State’s share carried for Morobe landowners, and it set the tax terms. Governor Luther Wenge said in mid-2023 that the SML would follow by November of that year. It did not. Marape then set a deadline for December 2024’s PNG Investment Week. It slipped again. Government sources pointed to a first-quarter 2025 target for the MDC, an aspirational timeline that was not formally announced. Gone. Marape told Parliament he wanted the deal closed by September 16, 2025, in time for PNG’s 50th Independence anniversary. That, too, passed without a signature. The current target is the Sydney conference at the end of November 2026.
Four formal public deadlines. One aspirational target. Five misses. The sixth is now on the calendar.
What the Government Actually Sent, and What It’s Still Waiting For
On August 8, 2024, the State Negotiating Team, chaired by Dairi Vele, delivered its Position Paper to Newmont and Harmony, covering the mechanics of the State’s 30% equity, how that equity gets financed, the value of the 3% royalty, and local content commitments. A month later, at a September 6, 2024 meeting in Port Moresby attended by Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso, Morobe Governor Wenge and Community Development Minister Jason Peter, Marape delivered the line PNG has heard on repeat since. “The project is one or two meetings away from the MDC being signed and issuance of SML,” he told The National at the time.
That was July 2024. As of Marape’s own statement on July 2, 2026, the joint venture still has not sent a formal written response to that Position Paper. Two years. One or two meetings, repeated on an annual loop.
To understand why, look past the Prime Minister’s podium and toward Johannesburg. In March 2026, Harmony’s chief executive gave South Africa’s Financial Mail an assessment that never made it into a PNG press release. “We’ve been continuously talking, but we’re not getting to a favourable outcome,” Nel said, describing a state negotiating structure so layered it required, in his words, something close to a marriage counsellor.
Marape convened a Project Review Team in 2026, an independent body meant to diagnose why the project has stalled, which reports back to the very State Negotiating Team it was created to unblock. In January 2026, following talks with Harmony chairman Patrice Motsepe at the World Economic Forum, Marape said the peer review team’s findings on outstanding technical matters were expected within the month.
By March, in response to a parliamentary question from Bulolo MP Sam Basil Jr, Marape was still describing “areas where both sides are negotiating firmly,” including unresolved land boundary verification and landholder identification work in Morobe. In February 2026, he told Parliament the Government is awaiting JV responses to the Position Paper and that land boundary verification and landholder identification remain under review, though he insisted this would not delay the broader negotiation.
This is not a project one or two meetings from signature. It is a project whose own joint venture partner is on record saying the meetings are not landing anywhere.
The Landowner Question the Government Would Rather Sequence Later
PNG’s Mining Act 1992 is explicit: under Sections 154 and 155, a tenement holder must sign a compensation agreement with the customary landholder and pay for land use and land damage before entering or occupying that land for exploration or mining. A legal opinion published in The National in March 2024 alleged that Wafi Mining Ltd and Newcrest PNG 2 Ltd, the JV entities, had no evidence of such an agreement despite exploration activity already under way. A separate Notice to Show Cause circulated on social media made the same allegation. Neither claim has been tested in court or confirmed through official government records, and still remain unverified.
The Mineral Resources Authority has said publicly it will complete the Community Development Agreement for Porgera before it starts landowner consultations for Wafi-Golpu. Infrastructure Development Grants for Morobe, reportedly worth up to K1.2 billion, remain unreleased, pending a Development Forum that has not yet been scheduled in available records. Marape told Parliament in March 2026 that land boundary verification work in the project area was still under review, though he insisted this would not delay the broader negotiation.
Multiple landowning clans in the Wafi-Golpu footprint, including the Yanta, have separately asserted competing claims over the customary land involved, a dispute the Mining Act says must run through the Land Court under the Land Dispute Settlement Act before any landholder can be legally recognised. None of that machinery appears to have concluded.
The Real Cost of “Waiting”
Every year of delay is not neutral. It is a year of foregone tax revenue, foregone royalty income, and foregone jobs: construction alone is expected to run five years and create roughly 2,600 positions once it starts. It is also a year in which the copper cycle Harmony is betting on keeps moving without Wafi-Golpu in it. Nel told Financial Mail that even if PNG issued the SML in 2026, first production would not arrive before 2031, and that assumes the 30-month FEED-to-FID clock and a further five-year build run without incident. Compare that to Anglo American’s Quellaveco project in Peru, shelved for 26 years before a 2011 “dialogue table” broke the impasse and unlocked construction within a decade. Wafi-Golpu’s own dialogue table, the SNT-PRT structure, has been running for months without a comparable breakthrough.
Marape has framed the delay as discipline, not dysfunction, pointing repeatedly to the Lihir mine as the cautionary tale: a project that, despite gold trading above US$3,000 an ounce, contributed relatively little in corporate tax to the State over the past decade. While Lihir’s fiscal terms were negotiated under a different policy regime in the 1990s, the Government argues Wafi-Golpu’s 30% corporate tax + 2% stability tax, 3% royalty with no deductions, and 55% State benefit share are explicitly designed to avoid similar fiscal leakage. “We owe it to our people to secure the best possible deal, not just for today, but for the next 40 years and beyond,” he told Parliament in March 2026.
It is a defensible position. A 40-year contract signed in haste is harder to fix than a negotiation that runs two years long. But defensible patience and repeated broken deadlines are not the same thing, and PNG’s business community has started to notice the difference.
What Newmont Brings, and What Changed in 2026
Newmont’s arrival as operator, following its global acquisition of Newcrest, was framed by Marape in June 2026 as a reset moment: “We’re now at the stage where the principle of what constitutes the Mine Development Contract and Special Mining Lease is waiting to be agreed upon,” he said, welcoming Newmont into the country and noting the company had committed to keeping its Port Moresby office despite a global restructuring. Marape has pointed to the successful conclusion of the Porgera MDC and SML as evidence the same playbook can work for Wafi-Golpu. Porgera, however, involved different partners, a different ownership structure, and a mine already in production, not a greenfield project awaiting its first shovel.
The Sydney Test
Whatever else changes between now and late November, the venue for the next reckoning is fixed. PNG Investment Week runs November 29 to December 2, 2026, at Sydney’s International Convention Centre, with the Prime Minister expected to headline alongside Australian government representatives and PNG’s resource sector ministers. Marape has said the Government wants the MDC and SML ready simultaneously for that stage, a break from the earlier sequencing, where the MDC was meant to precede the SML. If that timeline holds, it would be the first hard deadline of the past five that actually lands on schedule.
If it does not, Wafi-Golpu enters its eleventh year since the SML application with no signature, no lease, and no first production before the end of the decade, while Harmony’s own chief executive keeps describing talks that go nowhere in particular. Papua New Guinea’s 55% of a US$28 billion project is worth waiting for. Whether it is worth waiting for indefinitely is the question the Government has yet to answer in public.
The Bottom Line
Marape’s numbers, 55% of economics, 30% equity, a 3% royalty with no deductions, represent one of the strongest resource deals PNG has negotiated on paper. But a deal on paper generates nothing. It is the signature that starts the clock, and that clock has not started. Ten years after the SML application, three years after the Framework MoU, two years after the Position Paper, and five broken deadlines later, the test in Sydney this November is not whether PNG can negotiate a good deal. It has already done that. The test is whether it can close one.
Editorial note: This analysis draws on official statements from the PNG Department of Prime Minister and National Executive Council, Parliamentary responses reported by The National and The PNG Sun, and on-record comments from Harmony Gold CEO Beyers Nel published by Financial Mail and Miningmx (March 2026). The 12 million ounce gold and three million tonne copper figures are based on the JORC-compliant Wafi-Golpu Technical Report (June 2022), prepared by the joint venture and available on Mining Data Online. Allegations regarding Mining Act compliance are reported as allegations, not established fact.
