Ghana’s government-backed GoldBod initiative has come under sharp fire from Professor Stephen Adei, who argues that the policy is not cleaning up the mining sector but instead giving illicit operations a pathway into the formal market.
Adei, a former Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission, delivered his criticism in a widely circulated video in which he accused the Mahama administration of dressing up the galamsey crisis as a formalisation effort. He insisted that the Gold Board model effectively shields illegal mining under an official banner.
In the video, he linked political influence, traditional authority and security operatives to the continued degradation of rivers and streams, noting that many water bodies now show alarming contamination levels.
“Who are the galamseyers? The politicians, the chiefs, and the security agents are responsible for polluting the whole of water sources in Ghana. They have a way of making it look nice,” he said.
He went further to claim that GoldBod itself widens the space for illegal operators rather than pushing them out. “For example, the current government, which in many ways is doing well, has legalised galamsey. GoldBod is the legalisation of galamsey. We buy from the small-scale miners; if we’re able to distinguish between the small-genuine gold miners and the galamseyers, we could have stopped the galamseyers,” Professor Adei claimed.
Adei argued that establishing a single state buyer signals a willingness to absorb gold from mining activities that violate environmental rules. In his view, the system creates room for mixing legitimate output with gold sourced from destructive sites, which he described as a form of laundering.
GoldBod was introduced to bring order to the sector by tightening oversight of gold trading, especially within the small-scale mining space. The structure requires licensed miners to sell to the Board through vetted aggregators in an attempt to build a traceable and more accountable value chain.
