Seth Quaye: Driving Ghana’s Mining Innovation Through Local Content and Engineering Excellence

Can you provide an overview of MAC Partners Limited, including its key operations and industry role?

MAC Partners is currently a company with three subsidiaries. We are into aftermarket support for the mining industry, equipment, parts and services, and we are into engineering. We do full scale engineering from design to construction, and we can do that in pieces depending on what the customer needs. But we like to think we are EPC contractors, so Engineer, Procure and Construct (EPC). Then we have technical training wing as well, where we train mining industry skills set. I mean, basically it’s for all industry, but we are focused in the mining industry, so basically engineering process training and mining development training as well. Then, of course, recently, we’ve set up a manufacturing unit where we produce mining consumables. The company started in 2014 when I was fired from my previous company for not being good enough. So, I decided to prove myself that I’m good enough. So that’s why, that’s where we are. 

Can you provide a detailed overview of your core manufacturing business and the support services you offer?

In support services, basically, well, we are a support services company by definition, because we are not an operating mine. We support the operating mines with different services. But within our portfolio, we have the four units that I’m saying, the aftermarket support services we sell primarily alternative parts to the original equipment, and we support the services on them as well, like maintenance and advice, as well as spare parts. We actually keep inventories on site or in our own warehouse to support these mines. So that’s basically the sales or training side, you could call it…so that’s one. That’s how we started the business…that was original start. Then we developed into an engineering company where we build small things, water mines, construct a little bit of things, to the extent that now we do full engineering, from concept development through to construction. So we can engineer a project. If you have a problem that you want to design something, we can sit with you and come up with a solution, design a solution and implement it for you if you wish. So we could operate it along the whole chain. Then as well. In 2021, we annexed, in partnership with AngloGold, we took over their engineering training school, which was a school for training their engineers. We came into an arrangement with them, and we took over the facilities for the mine of life. So we’ve been occupying that place as our home. And then we run the Training School, which is the Mac Partners Training Institute. We basically continue what they were doing, plus we added more mining industry training.
Then in 2023 we decided to go into manufacturing. In fact, it had been the vision of the company, I’ll say my vision, when we started. I came from a trading, mine support service background with a multinational, and one of the things that I had wished that happened then was investing into local production of some products, but it never happened. The multinationals have their own agenda. They like to produce from different parts of the world where cost is relatively cheaper, and it’s understandable. But being a Ghanaian and an industry player too, I thought that Ghana needs to see a bit of that. So as part of my local content advocacy, we decided to go into the local production of some of the products. We started in 2022 with some epoxy production, what we call ‘crasher backing compound’. It’s used in the mining industry. We started that, and it was going quite well, and we’ve moved on to a much bigger one, which is the production of mill lining and rubber products. We’ve set up a plant in Obuasi, which takes raw rubber from local rubber, and processes it into different mining industry consumables, which are quite critical. So yeah, those are the four areas that we operate right now. But like I said, it is our aim to localise a lot of the production things that we sell. Normally, we like to do it in partnership with our original manufacturers or suppliers, because then we transfer the skills and the knowledge into the local team.
That takes us to the name itself. When I, when I started the company, that was a vision. I already said Mining and Construction Partners (MAC). The idea is to bring technical partnerships, to bring solutions to the mining industry. That’s how it started. So the name is Mining and Construction Partners.

What is your perspective on the current state of the industry? How is it evolving?

Good. I mean, in one word, gold price is very good. It’s at its highest in decades. So there’s good potential. It makes the investors also invest more. A lot of projects going on now so the potential is high, more so in West Africa than just specifically Ghana. So I see a very big future in the industry. We are looking to grow with the industry. 

What are the primary challenges in the mining sector, followed by the key opportunities?

The challenges are many. I actually don’t like talking about challenges, because it sort of slows you down. You don’t do the things that you want to do. But I personally like to work from my vision. I mean, since I set up and said I would localise things, I try to look at that so the challenges are there, like, of course, doing business in Ghana, finding capital, is one. It’s a very difficult terrain and that’s also one of the reasons why you’ve taken so long for us to do what we are doing in manufacturing, because we have to, most of the things we are doing, we are using internally generated funds, so we make money, and you put it back into the business, that kind of thing. So yeah, that’s how we overcame the hurdle. But of course, some of the banks, too has been quite helpful. I will mention Absa, for example. They supported us in our growth stage. Which is good. So apart from the funding challenge, the rest are the people. Sometimes it’s difficult to find the right people to work with, but with the right HR machinations, you get people to operate, and we’ve been trying to codify performance these days, so we are getting that right too. But in terms of the product and the market, no doubt that it’s going to be successful because the mines use the products Currently, they import it, they have long lead times to wait for stuff, and they sometimes have to keep inventory, just because it has to come with a long delivery time. We manufacturing locally gives you an almost just in time, at least you know that there’s next door production units that can if you go into Europe and places, most of the mines don’t really keep that much inventory because the manufacturing is not too far from them. That’s what we want to try to replicate here. 

What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), what makes you stand out from the competition?

I think it’s in our values, really, we have four core values that we work with. It’s that we are continuously improving, continuously improving the way we work ourselves and the services we provide to our customer. That’s our first value. Continuous improvement. We like to see within MAC partners that continuous improvement is our mentality. That’s how we think. Every time a customer gives us a job, and describes the scope, we ask ourselves, how can we do it better?
The next one is accountability. When we promise a job, we deliver that. We don’t walk away until the customer is happy, sometimes at our own cost, but we just want to make sure the customer is happy. That’s how you get repeat business.
The next other value is respect. We respect our customers immensely. Sometimes you go to a customer, you think you know what they want, but you have to listen to them to tell you what they want. So, based on what they want, we deliver results. That’s also key.
But above it all, is excellence. We define excellence as addressing every job with the same superior skills. No matter the size. A customer will give you a small job, we come at it with the same intensity as we will with a big job, whether it’s more money or big money, we do that. So I think that’s what differentiate us. It’s all in our core value, so we live it. We basically try to do that. The other thing, especially in our engineering unit, we like to say that we help customers solve unique problems. We don’t do one size fits all. Every task you give us, we think through it from first principles to make sure that we are doing it right, not copying something we have done elsewhere for you. I will say it sounds like a long USP, but that’s what it is. 

Do you extend your services beyond your home country?

Primarily, we do organize our main base, and then we provide the services from here (Ghana). But we are very active in Guinea, serving a couple of the mines there, very well with people for about a five-year period, we’ve had people on the mine, servicing the mine, and then we sell into Ivory Coast, Mali as well to customers, but all from Ghana. But in 2022 we found that Burkina Faso is quite an interesting market. So we actually open an office. Now we have a presence in Burkina Faso, and it’s also part of the local content agenda, just as we have in Ghana. They also have a very robust or becoming robust with local content. So we decided to register locally as ourselves, but now we’re looking for a local partner there too to make it even more local. 

How does technology and digital transformation influence your operations and the services you provide to customers?

Well, we sell technology, so we basically find the current or the most relevant technologies that our customers need, and we provide it, be it in the parts that we supply or equipments or some need that a customer has. So, I mean, like I said, we have technology partners as well across the globe: South Africa, Germany and Sweden, who come with us to supply the solutions to our market. So in that sense, wherever extra technology is needed, we incorporate it. However, we are not a technology developing company ourselves. So yeah, we use technologies that exist to serve our customers. Of course, when it comes to the AI technologies like Chat GPT and all those stuff, yes, we use them to also facilitate our work, especially in our training unit; because of our training unit, we are looking at that as well how to bring that in. For example, we do trainings in equipment maintenance and stuff like that. There as well, we try to bring in diagnostics, tools and stuff like that. In our welding and fabrication, we are considering robotic welding and stuff like that to do works for us. Yeah, that’s how technology plays. We are looking for ways to improve what we do.

What are your thoughts or insights on sustainability in the mining sector, particularly in relation to business practices?

I always say sustainability is two things: the sustainability of my business, that is one, and then environmental sustainability, which is probably what you are talking about. Yeah, we, we try. I mean…because our customers are very much tuned into all those SDGs and ESG principles we have we have to follow, so we do that as much as we can. I mean, not just as CSR, but also try to put in…deliberate systems in our operations that would yield to those results. In fact, our local production is also a way of reducing our carbon footprint, isn’t it? So it’s part of sustainability. I’ll be honest, we don’t have a policy on that, but we are tagging along, particularly because all our customers are in the industries where that is a very key thing. Eventually we will get there. In our last strategy session, it came up that we need to have a clear policy on those directions. So yeah, we will.

Does your company engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and if so, what specific practices do you implement?

We do some CSR in a few different areas. I mean, it’s an interesting thing to discuss. Our customers, for example, sponsor their communities for training with us to develop skills within the communities, and we offer the training, and we give discounts in that sense. Then in our Obuasi area, for example, we’ve sponsored High School quizzes and women programs that come around like that. That’s we do those things too. We have tied our CSR to our customers one way or the other. But like I said, they are on in one of our meetings, we decided we must have our own direction on what we want to with CSR. CSR comes out of your profit, isn’t it? Where do you want to put that money? Today we have tied our hands to our customers, and when they are doing something, we chip in. 

Are you currently involved in any projects outside of manufacturing?

Yeah, I think maybe we’re doing a few different things. We were very instrumental in the redevelopment of the AGA Obuasi mine. We’ve been there since 2019, through phase two, phase three; we are still with them. We did quite a lot of the major underground refurbishments ourselves; we were one of the…I don’t want to say largest, but one of the major contractors on that site. But currently the most exciting one I think we are working on, and probably the only Ghanaian company doing that is, we building a plan almost from scratch with Northern Ashanti Mines. We belong to the Nguvu group. They have a mine in Konongo where we went in initially for a refabrication of a small mine, but it’s become a rebuilding of the mine. We started with the design phase, we’ve procured the items; we are constructing now on-site, and by the end of the first quarter of 2026, there will be a mine running which was entirely put together by us and our customer.
That’s a very big one. We are very excited about that one.

What are the key goals and aspirations for MAC Partners Limited over the next five years?

I think…our goal is to be the leading mine support service company in West Africa, and I think we are on a way to become that. I think that in the next five years, we would have a bigger presence in West Africa. We would have resourced our Burkina office properly. We’ll probably establish a base in Guinea and Ivory Coast; the expansion of our footprint is very critical in that sense. One other thing that we started doing a year and a half ago was breeding the new crop of engineers to take over the company in what we call a ‘Talent Acquisition Program’. We want to increase that. We have about 10 guys under training now, and we are bringing in an expat. In the next five years we want to create young people who will be industry experts for the mining industry. That’s five years. If you ask me, 20 years, it’ll be a different vision. We are putting out the building blocks to becoming West Africa’s number one support services company. 

Can you share your passion and personal journey, whether as an engineer or through another experience that shaped your career?

I trained as a mechanical engineer from the University of Science and Technology (KNUST): the only Engineering University in West Africa. That’s where I trained. And I also went out to do my masters in Norway, still in mechanical engineering. When I got back, I went straight into the mining sector with my previous company. I started as a sales engineer. So, all the engineering I have learnt went into selling. So, I plan and sell. I’ve not really worked as a hands-on engineer, but I worked in an engineering environment, so I still I grew up. But I’ve always been very, I think, entrepreneurial in my thinking. In my previous company, I used to always dream up new things and then we do it. I spoke to my bosses about the need to expand. When I took over that company, after three, four years in there as the MD, I decided to move it into West Africa; and we did. From that one country operation, we went into the 16 West African countries doing some business or the other. When I left in 2013, of course, that’s where I’ve spent my life alone so I had to continue that for myself, and that was the birth of MAC Partners. Now you know the MAC Partners’ story. But aside that, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I do a few other things as well. I’ve got a farm, I grow crops and I rear animals. Myself, my wife and our kids, we run a school as well. So yeah, that’s my journey.

What message would you like to share with fellow Ghanaian companies—perhaps about collaboration, growth, or innovation in the industry?

Well, I think if it’s a message to give to Ghanaian companies, is that we should try as much as possible to bring the expertise that are out there, helping other countries locally, to help our industries. I want to see a day when mining supplies will be 80% supplied out of Ghana; manufacturing, I mean, not just importing, which is what we do a lot of now. Myself and my company, we are positioning ourselves as “Local Content Ambassadors,” working very hard with the Chamber of mines and the Minerals Commission to make sure that the tenets of the local content law as as it stands now, are achieved. As I did say at the WAMPEX (West African Mining & Power Exhibition), I think we need to get to a point where we change it to a foreign participation law, in the sense that at that point, Ghanaians will own a majority of the business and see how we regulate, rather encourage foreign partners to come in with technology to help us grow, rather than what we are doing now.