Afenyo-Markin Desperate to Find Scandal in GoldBod Dealings
The struggle to formalise Ghana’s artisanal gold sector has turned into a high-stakes political and economic contest. Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has seized on an International Monetary Fund report showing over $1.7bn in losses under the central bank’s domestic gold purchase programme in 2025 to frame the new Ghana GoldBod as a “scandal waiting to happen”.
Afenyo-Markin’s warning delivered with biblical flair, casting himself against the board’s management as Sanballat stood against Nehemiah is less about theology and more about political positioning.
With the NPP in opposition, the Effutu MP is clearly testing the Mahama administration’s vulnerability on fiscal discipline. Yet his critique sidesteps a crucial distinction that GoldBod executives and independent economists are now hammering home.
GoldBod Chief Executive Sammy Gyamfi and University of Ghana’s Professor Ebo Turkson have both moved to contain the damage, emphasising that the $1.7bn loss figure cited by the IMF in its 2026 Article IV consultation is a cost borne by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) not by GoldBod itself.
The programme, which saw significant scaling-up in 2025, was designed to build reserve buffers and curb gold smuggling. Turkson insists the entity is not running at a loss and that the IMF’s figure reflects central bank balance-sheet dynamics rather than operational mismanagement by the board.
Nevertheless, the numbers are stark: 1.5% of GDP has evaporated through the programme’s expansion, handing Afenyo-Markin a cudgel just as the government tries to defend its flagship intervention in the precious metals trade. The political risk is real—but so is the structural inertia GoldBod faces.
A more intriguing intervention has come from Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams, who, speaking after a church service, raised the alarm over what he described as powerful, established interests mobilising against the board.
Citing intelligence from a Sheikh and other contacts, he claimed that those who previously obtained gold through illicit networks are now fighting to preserve their access. Duncan-Williams went further, alleging that foreign buyers hold records of smuggled gold quantities that officially dwarf Ghana’s own sales statistics.
“For whatever reason, it looks like the rules and the laws are not working,” the Archbishop observed, pointing directly at political paralysis. He argued that enforcement agencies are hamstrung because MPs fear losing their seats if they pursue galamsey operators too aggressively.
For GoldBod, the real test lies beneath the political noise and the IMF’s spreadsheets. The board is attempting to monopolise formal gold purchases in a sector long ruled by informal cartels operators with deep pockets, established foreign buyers, and a history of impunity.
The IMF’s $1.7bn figure, whether attributed to the BoG or GoldBod, exposes the high cost of this policy experiment. But as Duncan-Williams suggests, the bigger threat may not be the accounting loss it is whether a state institution can break the stranglehold of entrenched interests that profit from opacity, and whether Accra has the political will to see the fight through.