- Senyo Hosi Says Ghana Is Losing Galamsey War, Calls for Formalisation, Technology and Water-Quality Targets
Ghana should abandon the assumption that illegal small-scale mining can simply be defeated through arrests, equipment seizures and military-style operations and instead move towards formalising the activity, improving mining technology and measuring success by the recovery of rivers, forests and agricultural land, according to businessman and policy advocate Senyo Hosi.
In one of his strongest assessments yet of the country’s anti-galamsey campaign, Mr Hosi argued that Ghana was “nowhere near winning” and that the deterioration of water quality showed that years of enforcement activity had failed to produce the environmental outcomes by which the policy should ultimately be judged.
“I don’t think we should beat about the Bush. The truth of the matter is that we are nowhere near winning the fight against calamity. We are nowhere near winning at all. And it is fair to actually say we have failed in that fight,” he said in the discussion contained in a transcript reviewed by NorvanReports.
His argument strikes at the heart of how successive governments have presented the campaign against illegal mining.
Official accounts of anti-galamsey operations frequently emphasise arrests, excavators seized or immobilised, water pumps confiscated and mining sites raided. Mr Hosi does not dismiss enforcement altogether. His contention is that these numbers describe what government is doing, not whether the policy is working.
“The effect of every single intervention must yield a certain output,” he said, identifying water bodies, forest reserves, food quality and national security as the outcomes that should matter.
“What is the data showing us? Have we made progress or we have retrogressed water quality? We are retrogressing.”
That distinction between inputs and outcomes is potentially one of the most consequential challenges to Ghana’s existing anti-illegal-mining architecture.
When the programme’s arrests were raised as evidence of progress, Mr Hosi responded that the number of people detained would be meaningless if the rivers continued to deteriorate.
“Arrest 1 million people,” he said. “And if when you arrest 10 million or 200 million people, the water is not improving, it’s rather getting worse. Tell me, what is the policy outcome of the intervention?”
He added: “This is the mistake we make in this country. We discuss policy from a point of input and not the output.”
The criticism comes despite enforcement operations attributed in the discussion to NAIMOS, including arrests and the seizure or immobilisation of mining equipment.
Mr Hosi’s point is that such interventions should ultimately be translated into measurable environmental recovery.
He proposed a radically simpler accountability mechanism: publish the data.
Ghana Water Company, he argued, should regularly disclose the quality and turbidity of raw water entering treatment plants. The Forestry Commission should publish the condition of forest reserves. Relevant scientific institutions should release periodic data on food quality and contamination.
If those indicators improve, the policy can reasonably claim success. If they deteriorate despite rising arrests and equipment seizures, government should reconsider the strategy.
He urged the President to demand the data directly. “Every week Mr. President Ghana Water should publish the data on the quality of our water,” Mr Hosi said, adding that information on food quality and the state of forest reserves should also be released periodically.
The proposal would fundamentally change the political incentives around illegal mining.
Instead of governments announcing how many excavators had been seized, citizens would be able to ask whether turbidity at a particular water-treatment intake had fallen over six months; whether hectares of degraded forest were recovering; or whether concentrations of mining-related contaminants in food-producing areas were declining.
It would turn the galamsey fight into something closer to a performance contract.
But Mr Hosi’s diagnosis goes considerably further.
He argues that Ghana may already have moved beyond the point at which illegal mining can be treated simply as a criminal activity that government can order out of existence.
After discussions with mining communities, policymakers and industry executives, he said he had concluded that galamsey had become deeply embedded in local livelihoods, political networks and community economies.
“The socio economic reality is that Galamse has become a livelihood. It is so endemic you can hardly separate it from the path of politics, economics and community harmony,” he said.
“The chiefs are supporting it, the families are supporting it.”
That is the uncomfortable economic reality beneath Ghana’s environmental crisis.
In communities where formal employment opportunities are limited, informal gold mining can generate incomes far beyond what many young people could reasonably expect from conventional entry-level work.
Mr Hosi illustrated the point with the example of a junior-high-school dropout earning between GH¢3,000 and GH¢10,000 a week from mining.
Whether those earnings are representative across the sector is not established in the transcript. But the example captures the policy problem: government is asking some communities to surrender an unusually lucrative livelihood without having created a sufficiently attractive alternative.
Illegal miners are not operating in a social vacuum. They buy goods, rent accommodation, employ workers, finance families and inject money into communities.
Mr Hosi went further, making the politically explosive claim that revenues from illegal mining have become intertwined with politics, churches and parts of the media.
“Galamse is funding our politics. Galamse is funding our churches. Galamse is funding media,” he said.
Those claims are Mr Hosi’s assessment and are not independently substantiated by the transcript. But they illuminate why repeated declarations of war against galamsey have struggled to translate into sustained enforcement.
If the economic beneficiaries of an activity extend beyond miners to financiers, traditional authorities, businesses, political networks and other influential actors, the problem is no longer merely one of policing.
Mr Hosi also connected the problem directly to Ghana’s external sector, arguing that gold has become so important to export earnings that policymakers may hesitate to undertake enforcement measures capable of sharply reducing production.
He claimed that 63% of Ghana’s exports depended on gold and that more than half of that came from artisanal and small-scale mining, while arguing that a substantial portion of ASM production was linked, directly or indirectly, to illegal activity.
Those figures and the implied link between ASM production and galamsey are presented in the transcript as Mr Hosi’s claims rather than independently verified statistics.
Nevertheless, the economic conflict he identifies is real in principle. Ghana wants cleaner rivers. It also wants gold exports. It wants to eliminate illegal mining, while at the same time increasing formal gold purchases, building foreign-exchange reserves and capturing gold that would otherwise be smuggled across borders.
Those objectives can collide if enforcement reduces gold supply faster than legal and environmentally sustainable production can replace it. That is why Mr Hosi now argues that the country should change the vocabulary and the strategy.
“Our only path forward is fixing Galamc, not fighting and stopping Galamse,” he said.
It is a provocative proposition because formalising an activity that has devastated rivers and forests could easily be interpreted as surrender.
But his argument is not that environmentally destructive mining should be accepted unchanged. It is that government should recognise the economic incentives driving informal mining and use technology, licensing and investment to change how the gold is extracted.
Mr Hosi estimates that galamsey operators typically recover only about 30% to 40% of the gold available in their mining processes because they use inefficient technology, compared with roughly 90% to 95% recovery rates that he attributes to large-scale mining operations.
His proposed solution is to formalise operators, introduce better processing technology and increase their recovery rates towards roughly 80%.
“The galamsayers recover around 30 to 40% of the gold in their mining. And they use suboptimal technology. The large scale mining people, they recover 90 to maybe 95% of gold in their processes and and they do it responsibly,” he said.
If a miner can recover substantially more gold from the same ore, government may be able to impose stricter environmental requirements without necessarily reducing the miner’s income.
The additional value generated from higher recovery rates could potentially finance cleaner technology, land reclamation, water management and environmental controls.
“When you use technology and we use some investments to now convert their output from 30% recovery to about 80% recovery we can use that delta, that differential to fund the correction of the activity,” Mr Hosi argued.
“Not just reclamation but more the technology that they use so that they do not degrade our environment.”
That would represent a dramatic departure from Ghana’s traditional strategy. Instead of spending most political energy attempting to chase miners out of communities, the state would seek to bring them into a controlled production architecture legally recognised operators, approved mining areas, modern recovery technology, traceable gold sales and measurable environmental obligations.
Formalisation can become legalisation without reform if politically connected operators simply receive licences while destructive mining continues. Better recovery technology can also increase the profitability of mining and encourage further expansion unless mining areas and environmental rules are tightly enforced.
And there are some places protected forests, river buffers and critical watersheds where environmental protection may require mining to stop altogether regardless of its commercial value.
The policy choice therefore need not be between unrestricted galamsey and total prohibition. A more credible strategy may distinguish between where mining can never be permitted, where small-scale mining can operate under strict conditions, and how legal operators must mine if they are to remain in business.
That would require a regulatory system capable of doing something Ghana has repeatedly struggled to achieve: enforce rules consistently against politically connected and ordinary operators alike.
Mr Hosi’s diagnosis ultimately raises a deeper question about the meaning of success. If 200 people are arrested but river turbidity rises, has government succeeded? If 170 excavators are immobilised but illegal mining spreads to another district, has enforcement worked? If gold exports rise and foreign-exchange reserves improve while the rivers supplying drinking water become increasingly expensive to treat, how should the country account for that trade-off?
Those questions cannot be answered by arrest statistics. They require environmental and economic data capable of showing the total cost of Ghana’s gold economy.
That is why Mr Hosi’s call for publicly reported water, forest and food-quality indicators may prove more important than his provocative declaration that the “fight” has failed.
Ghana has spent years measuring the force deployed against galamsey. The next phase may require measuring what that force actually changes. If river quality improves, forest degradation slows, contaminated land is reclaimed and miners are moved into traceable, technologically efficient and environmentally controlled operations, government could plausibly argue that policy is working.
If those indicators continue deteriorating despite more raids, arrests and seized machines, the conclusion becomes harder to avoid.
The galamsey crisis is no longer simply a contest between government and illegal miners. It is a struggle between Ghana’s dependence on gold and its dependence on the natural systems that gold extraction is destroying.
Mr Hosi’s intervention therefore presents policymakers with an uncomfortable alternative: stop pretending that enforcement statistics equal victory and start designing a mining economy in which the financial incentives of miners, the economic interests of the state and the survival of Ghana’s rivers and forests can coexist.
Because ultimately, the most important statistic in the fight against galamsey is not how many people government arrests. It is whether the water is getting cleaner.
