- From Raids to Reform: Senyo Hosi Proposes New Economic Bargain for Small-Scale Mining
Ghana must abandon its reliance on episodic raids and redesign artisanal and small-scale mining so that lawful and environmentally responsible operations become more profitable than illegal mining, businessman and economic policy advocate Senyo Hosi has argued.
In a policy paper titled From Pretence and Raids to Reform: A New Strategy for Galamsey, Mr Hosi said the country’s anti-illegal-mining campaign was measuring government activity rather than environmental and economic outcomes.
He argued that arrests, excavator seizures and temporary site closures could create the appearance of enforcement while polluted rivers, degraded land, unsafe pits and illegal production remained largely unchanged.
“What is not winnable is our present strategy of simply trying to stop it,” Mr Hosi said. “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, he said, should be measured against agreed baselines and reported publicly by independent institutions.
“Otherwise, activity will continue to masquerade as progress,” he warned.
The proposal challenges the central assumption behind Ghana’s existing galamsey strategy: that stronger enforcement alone can suppress illegal mining.
Mr Hosi’s argument is that enforcement remains necessary but cannot defeat an industry that is economically lucrative, rooted in community livelihoods and tolerated by parts of the political system.
The policy paper cited developments in Osino, where miners reportedly returned to an illegal site shortly after the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat had removed them.
Equipment was reassembled and mining resumed after the task force departed.
“The pattern seldom changes: the task force leaves, the miners return and galamsey restarts,” Mr Hosi said.
“If every raid merely resets the clock, then what exactly are we changing and what are we winning?”
The question exposes a weakness in enforcement operations that are not followed by continuous monitoring, prosecution, land reclamation or viable economic alternatives for affected communities.
Raids can disrupt production temporarily. But where the financial incentive remains powerful and local livelihoods depend on mining, the operators often wait for security personnel to leave before restarting.
Mr Hosi said the consequences of this failure extend beyond water pollution. He cited the deaths of 22 people in abandoned mining pits in the Central Region over seven months, alongside other cases involving collapsing pits and children dying in abandoned craters.
The limited public revolt within some affected communities, he argued, should not be interpreted as acceptance.
“The silence is not consent,” he said. “It is evidence of how tightly galamsey is bound to people’s survival in these communities.”
The paper also confronts the political economy surrounding illegal mining.
Mr Hosi argued that governments understand that an abrupt shutdown could remove incomes from fragile mining communities, weaken local commerce and provoke political resistance.
Mining also remains central to Ghana’s external sector. The paper said the industry accounted for 67.4% of export receipts in 2025, making any severe disruption a potential threat to foreign-exchange inflows and currency stability.
A poorly managed shutdown could therefore reduce gold exports, weaken the cedi and generate inflationary pressure, even if the environmental objectives were justified.
The environmental benefits of reform, meanwhile, take longer to become visible than the immediate economic pain caused by closing mining sites.
“Successive governments therefore retreat to the easier performance: strong rhetoric, periodic operations and little disruption of the interests that keep galamsey alive,” Mr Hosi said.
This does not absolve the government of responsibility. Rather, it suggests that Ghana’s failure to defeat galamsey is partly the result of a policy that forces governments to choose between environmental protection and immediate economic survival.
Any durable strategy must attempt to reconcile the two.
The income available from galamsey makes that task particularly difficult.
According to Mr Hosi, some junior high school dropouts earn between GH¢2,000 and GH¢10,000 a week from illegal mining considerably more than the monthly income of many formally employed graduates.
Security operations cannot compete with those earnings where alternative employment is scarce.
“Where formal jobs are scarce, NAIMOS raids cannot outcompete galamsey earnings,” he said.
Communities may consequently protect illegal miners because mining incomes support households, traders, transport operators and other local businesses.
Germany’s Ambassador to Ghana, Frederik Landshöft, recently estimated that about 1mn people work in artisanal and small-scale mining.
“Around one million people are estimated to work in artisanal and small-scale mining,” the ambassador said in remarks quoted by Mr Hosi.
“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 a better future.”
The implication is that galamsey is not simply an environmental crime committed by isolated operators. It has become an employment system operating in places where the formal economy has failed to generate comparable opportunities.
Mr Hosi proposes a shift from what he calls a strategy of suppression to one of restructuring.
The objective should not be to abolish artisanal and small-scale mining, but to change the incentives that determine how it operates.
“The way forward is therefore to make compliance more profitable than illegality and non-compliance consequential,” he said.
This would require more than issuing licences or relabelling illegal sites as community mines. Previous regularisation programmes, he argued, failed because environmentally responsible mining costs more while offering operators little financial reward for compliance.
The proposed model would use improved gold-recovery technology to finance safer mining, environmental protection and regulatory oversight.
Mr Hosi said conventional galamsey methods recover about 30% of the gold available in mined material, while the Ghana Chamber of Mines has estimated recovery at about 40%.
He argued that better geological information, mercury-free processing, closed-water systems and professional mine planning could potentially increase recovery to as much as 95%, approaching the performance of large-scale mines.
Higher recovery would mean extracting more gold from less ore, reducing the amount of land disturbed while increasing operator revenues.
A transparent share of the additional value could then finance improved equipment, training, processing infrastructure, monitoring, traceability and the reclamation of damaged land.
“If government wants the gold, it must fix the system that produces it,” Mr Hosi said.
Under the proposed arrangement, the government would help miners formalise and modernise their operations. Miners would, in return, adopt safer and environmentally responsible practices and repay public or facilitated investment from the additional income generated through improved recovery.
Ghana would retain the employment and foreign-exchange benefits of small-scale mining while seeking to reduce mercury use, river pollution, land destruction and fatal accidents.
The model would still require firm enforcement. Operators that received state support but failed to comply would have to face meaningful penalties.
Its success would also depend on transparency. Without credible governance, equipment, financing and processing facilities intended for responsible miners could be captured by political actors or redirected to illegal operations.
Mr Hosi therefore called for an independently verified scorecard for every mining district.
The reports should show whether public investment was reaching miners and whether it was producing measurable improvements in water quality, land reclamation, safety, lawful gold output and community livelihoods.
The proposal does not offer an easy solution. Building shared processing facilities, supplying geological information and monitoring thousands of operators would require significant capital and administrative capacity.
But it provides a clearer test of success than counting raids and seized excavators.
Ghana’s galamsey crisis has persisted partly because illegal mining remains economically rational for operators and communities, even when it is environmentally destructive for the country.
Changing that calculation may prove more difficult than deploying another task force. It may also be the reform without which every new raid merely prepares the ground for the miners’ return.
“We can win the fight against galamsey,” Mr Hosi said, “but only by changing how we fight, measuring outcomes and refusing to mistake activity for progress.”
