The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), Sammy Gyamfi, has attributed Ghana’s persistent illegal mining crisis partly to decades of inadequate formalisation and state support for artisanal and small-scale mining.

He said although Ghana began formalising the sector in 1989, successive governments failed to provide sufficient training, equipment, monitoring and environmental safeguards to make small-scale mining sustainable.

Mr Gyamfi said the problem was also worsened by the dominance of private operators in the domestic gold-buying sector, which, he argued, made it difficult for the state to effectively track the source of gold being purchased from miners.

He questioned whether previous government-backed gold-buying initiatives had adequate mechanisms to determine whether the gold being purchased was sourced from legitimate mining operations.

Speaking during a Space conversation on X on Sunday, August 9, Mr Gyamfi said, “Very little was done to provide formalisation support, training, capacity building, and investing in reclamation.”

He also questioned the traceability arrangements under the previous government’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, which was introduced in 2021 to support the purchase of gold for reserves, foreign exchange and the Gold for Oil programme.

“When government decided to go into gold purchases in 2021 under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, they were doing gold for oil, they were doing gold for reserves, they were doing gold for forex,” he said.

“But did you ever hear there was traceability under the ex-government? Did you ever hear an effort, even an effort to ensure that the gold they were buying for oil, gold for reserve, gold for forex was traceable?” he asked.

Mr Gyamfi said Ghana also failed to establish adequate systems to register and monitor mining equipment, geofence mining operations and track activities across mining areas.

He argued that the absence of a comprehensive traceability framework had made it difficult to determine whether gold purchased by the state originated from licensed operations or environmentally destructive illegal mining activities.