I rarely join a fight unless I can see a path to victory. I honestly believed the campaign against galamsey was such a fight, and I entered it with full conviction. It has cost me friends, earned me enemies and hurt my businesses. None of that is new to me, and none of it cows me.
But conviction must be matched by learning. The most important lesson I took from my policy lecturers, notably from Prof. Dordunoo, was that successful policy must be practical and flexible.
When a method repeatedly fails, persistence is not virtue;it is a refusal to learn.
Today, I remain convinced that the fight against galamsey is winnable. What is not winnable is our present strategy ofsimply trying to stop it.
We must win differently, with practicality, flexibility and a clear definition of success:cleaner rivers, reclaimed lands, traceable lawful production, protected and recovered forest reserves and good food quality. These outcomes must be measured from agreed baselines and reported publicly and independently. Otherwise, activity will continue to masquerade as progress.
The Osino Lesson: When Raids Merely Reset the Clock
Recent events in Osino capture the failure of the present strategy. Days after NAIMOS drove miners from an illegal site, they returned, reassembled the equipment and resumed work. The pattern seldom changes: the task force leaves, the miners return and galamsey restarts.If every raid merely resets the clock, then what exactly are we changing and what are we winning?
Even more unsettling is the silence after people have died in mining tragedies. Twenty-two people drowned in abandoned pits in the Central Region alone in only seven months. Elsewhere, collapsing pits have buried miners, and children have died in the craters left behind.
Yet these tragedies hardly ever provoke the sustained revolt one might expect from the communities suffering them. Are those of us outside crying more than the bereaved, or have we failed to understand what keeps the bereaved silent?
The silence is not consent. It is evidence of how tightly galamsey is bound to people’s survival in these communities.That is the reality any serious policy must confront: enforcement is necessary, but it cannot defeat a system that remains economically rewarding, socially embedded and politically tolerated.
Communities such as Jema, which have resisted galamsey, offer hope, but they remain rare exceptions to the prevailing norm.
The Pretence of Progress
The failure of our current strategy is not due to an absence of action; it is the result of substituting action for results. Raids, seizures and speeches create the appearance that our politicians are putting up a fight while galamsey sites, previously raided and shuttered, reopen.
Politicians count excavators seized and miners arrested, but rarely publish whether rivers are cleaner, land has been restored or lawful operations are safer, sustainable and more profitable. Without those measures, we cannot tell enforcement from performance.
The political caution is not difficult to understand.A sudden shutdown would cut income in fragile mining communities, disrupt local commerce and provoke resistance. It will hit the industry that anchors the economy and accounts for 67.4% of Ghana’s export receipts (2025).
The consequences will be immediate: depleted foreign-exchange inflows, a fast-depreciating cedi, hyperinflation and punitive electoral outcomes for the party in government.Environmental idealism and recovery, by contrast, are slower and less visible.
Successive governments therefore retreat to the easier performance:strong rhetoric, periodic operations and little disruption of the interests that keep galamsey alive.
Why Communities Cannot Simply Walk Away
Set aside the language of macroeconomics and consider the reality on the ground. Galamsey pays JHS dropouts between GHS2,000 and GHS10,000 a week. That is far more than many graduate workers earn.
Germany’s Ambassador to Ghana, Frederik Landshöft, captured the human stakes when he recently said:“Around one million people are estimated to work in artisanal and small-scale mining. That number should make us think because behind the debate about illegal mining are not only excavators, polluted rivers and degraded lands, there are also people, young people looking for a job, families looking for income, communities looking for opportunities and better future and we should not lose sight of that.”
Where formal jobs are scarce, NAIMOS raids cannot outcompete Galamsey earnings. Communities may therefore shield the miners whose incomes sustain local livelihoods. If the silence I referred to earlier made no sense, then you must realise now thatthere is a method to the NONSENSE.What looks like indifference is often economic dependence, and any credible solution mustbreak that dependence without destroying livelihoods.
The Strategic Shift: Fix to Fight
Breaking that dependence requires a strategic shift: instead of merely suppressing artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM),we must change how it works. I am not talking about the pretence of community-mining and other regularisation schemes which have not eliminated illegality or irresponsible practices.They failed because responsible mining costs more and provides no financial reward for compliance nor consequence for non-compliance.
The way forward is therefore to make compliance more profitable than illegality and noncompliance consequential. The answer is not to abolish artisanal and small-scale mining, but to fix the incentives that govern it.
Use Better Recovery to Finance Responsible Mining
Galamsey operators tell me that their conventional mining methods recover about 30% of available gold; the CEO of the Ghana Chamber of Mines has estimated galamsey recovery at about 40%. Experts interviewed explain thatbetter geological data, mercury-free processing, closed-water systems and professional mine planning could raise recovery to 95%,just like the major mines, whilereducingthe ore processed and land disturbed.That is more than twice as much gold for responsible and technology-driven ASM operations.
The key catch here is that it requires major investments and training in equipment, processes and people.Galamseyers will not invest in these, but government can and must, either on its own or through its facilitation. If government wants the gold, it must fix the system that produces it. In legal parlance, it cannot approbate and reprobate.
When effectively executed, a transparent share of the additional value recovered should finance the equipment, the reengineered processes and infrastructure, reclamation, monitoring and traceability required to make small-scale mining effective and responsible.
The New Bargain: Support, Compliance and Accountability
The bargain is clear:government helps miners formalise and modernise; miners adopt responsible practices, increase recovery and repay the investment from their additional income. Ghana gains more lawful gold and foreign exchange, mining jobs and community livelihoods are preserved, and damaged land and water are restored.
That bargain also defines the path advocacy should take: not simply opposing galamsey but pressing for the transformation of small-scale mining while holding both operators and government accountable.
Progress should be judged by cleaner rivers, reclaimed lands, traceable lawful production, safer and more profitable responsible ASM, and public investment that gives miners meaningful access to geological information, safer equipment, accredited processing, affordable finance and technical support.
Government should publish an independently verified scorecard for every mining district, showing whether those investments reach miners and produce measurable improvements in livelihoods, lawful output, safety, reclamation and water quality.
We can win the fight against galamsey but only by changing how we fight, measuring outcomes and refusing to mistake activity for progress.
This article is written by Senyo Hosi, the Convener of One Ghana Movement.
