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The Finance Act, No. 11 of 2025 — enacted by Parliament on 30 June 2025 with presidential assent the same day and effective from 1 July 2025 — is Tanzania's annual omnibus tax-and-fiscal instrument operationalising the FY2025/26 budget. Three of its provisions cut directly into the Mining Act, Cap. 123 and structurally extend the 2024-25 critical- minerals and local-content reform stack:
1. HIV Response Levy (new Mining Act Section 113A). A 0.1% levy on the gross value of minerals is imposed on every holder of a mineral right or mineral licence under the Mining Act, payable to the Commissioner-General of TRA at the same time as mineral royalty. Distribution is statutorily fixed: 70% to the AIDS Trust Fund established under the Tanzania Commission for AIDS Act, Cap. 379, and 30% to the Universal Health Insurance Fund established under the Universal Health Insurance Act, No. 12 of 2023. This is the first social-purpose mineral levy in Tanzania's mining tax stack and adds to the existing royalty (6% on metallic minerals, 4% on coal/industrial minerals), inspectorate fee (1%), and clearance fee for exported gold (1%).
2. Gold local-value-addition allocation horizontalised (Mining Act Section 59 amendment). Section 59 previously required that holders of government-contract gold rights allocate at least 20% of refined gold output to domestic smelting, refining, and trading operators. The Finance Act 2025 deletes the contract-holder limitation and extends the 20% domestic-allocation mandate to all gold-licence holders without exception, integrating with the Bank of Tanzania's domestic-gold-purchase programme and the buy-Tanzania-gold-first reserves-build push under the FY2025/26 budget.
3. Non-resident service-provider WHT raised to 10% (Mining Act Section 60 / Income Tax Act interaction). The withholding-tax rate applied to payments to non-resident service providers in the mining sector is raised, explicitly framed in the Bill's memorandum as an incentive to use local service providers — i.e. complementing the 2025-09-12 GN 563/2025 mandatory-JV-with-ITC regime with a tax-side disincentive on direct foreign-supplier contracting.
Legal authority: Article 99 of the Constitution and the Public Finance Act for the Finance Bill machinery; Mining Act, Cap. 123 (RE 2019) for the substantive amendments; Tanzania Commission for AIDS Act, Cap. 379 and Universal Health Insurance Act No. 12 of 2023 for the destination funds. Implementing regulators: TRA (levy collection) and Mining Commission / Ministry of Minerals (sector compliance).
the ~50 t/yr Tanzanian gold output (Barrick Bulyanhulu/North Mara, AngloGold Ashanti Geita, Shanta, Geita Gold Mining Ltd) at ~USD 4bn/yr exports, the HIV Response Levy adds roughly USD 4m/yr in earmarked social-fund payments. Small at the line-item level, but it is the first social-purpose mineral levy and establishes a template for further earmarked mining levies (UHI scaling, education, climate) under Cap. 123 §113A precedent.
pressure.** Removing the contract-holder limitation makes the 20% domestic-allocation requirement a horizontal obligation across all gold-licence holders. Combined with the Bank of Tanzania's domestic-gold-buying programme, this redirects ~10 t/yr of refined gold (assuming proportionate compliance) into the domestic smelting / refining / trading channel — a captive-supply layer for Tanzanian refiners and a working-capital constraint on offshore bullion-marketing arrangements.
service providers face a combined regime: (a) a structural mandate to operate via 20%-equity JVs with Indigenous Tanzanian Companies in non-reserved categories (or full exclusion in reserved categories) under GN 563/2025, plus (b) a 10% WHT on direct cross- border service payments under Finance Act 2025. The combined effect is a 2-3 percentage-point increase in effective foreign-supplier cost, intentionally favouring local-JV structures.
too.** The 454 critical-and-strategic-minerals licences issued by the Mining Commission between July 2025 and March 2026 (graphite, lithium, cobalt, REE, HMS, nickel) — flowing from the classification framework filed as 2024-11-05-tanzania-written-laws- no-4-2024-mining-act-critical-minerals — all fall under the §113A HIV Response Levy. The levy is intentionally non-discriminatory across mineral type, so critical-minerals output flowing to Western and Chinese supply chains carries the same 0.1% earmarked social charge as gold.
template.** Where GN 563/2025 captured services and supplier margin via local-content rules, Finance Act 2025 captures marginal mining cash-flow via tax-side instruments (the levy + the WHT raise). This is the EM-resource-nationalism template applied through tax-instrument channels rather than equity / ban channels — closer to the Saudi UVA-tax / Indonesia DHE-SDA fiscal-side capture than Indonesia hilirisasi export-ban capture.
value of minerals" needs implementing-regulation clarification on whether it is mine-gate value (royalty base) or FOB-export value for refined product. If the latter, the levy compounds with domestic-allocation pricing under the gold §59 amendment.
Mining Development Agreements.** Several of the major foreign- invested gold operations have negotiated MDAs with stability clauses. Whether the new §113A levy and the §59 amendment can override pre-existing MDA tax-stability undertakings is the open legal question — likely to be tested in any IRR-rebalancing negotiations between Barrick / AngloGold and the Treasury.
WHT as a raise; the prior rate under Income Tax Act §83(1)(b) for non-resident service providers in the extractive sector was 5% under earlier reforms. Confirm the prior baseline and the effective stacking with the 5% withholding-on-management-fees rule before propagating into severity-quant.
2026 wakes are likely to bring further beneficiation-mandate expansions and possibly a Permanent Sovereignty Act tightening cycle. The Finance Act 2025 establishes the fiscal-side baseline against which those further actions will be measured.