The Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC) Limited has announced a financial reward for anyone who provides information leading to the arrest of any individuals or groups involved in gold-smuggling business in Ghana.
The company’s acting managing director, Sammy Gyamfi, made the announcement during a stakeholder consultation meeting on Wednesday, 26 March 2025, in the Upper East regional capital, Bolgatanga.
The meeting was meant to discuss the objectives and functions of a newly established state-owned agency called the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod).
The stakeholders were traditional authorities, small-scale miners, representatives of civil society organisations, state agencies and youth-centred associations.
“Those of you who don’t have any business to do, if I were you, now GoldBod is giving you a new business: GoldBod Whistleblower. You can set up your office and even do your complimentary card. Do you know who the GoldBod whistleblower is? You will help us catch gold smugglers.
“When you see them, we have hotlines; you just give us the information. The taskforce, which will go and arrest that smuggler or the one buying the gold illegally, and the one who gave the correct information will be given 10% when we sell the gold,” he said.
He further stated: “So, if the gold we arrested is 1 tonne, that is 93 million dollars. 10% is 9.3 million dollars. We will share it with you. That alone can be your business.”
Why is Africa’s leading gold producer paying whistleblowers to catch gold smugglers?
There is a reason the PMMC, or the government, is doing this— paying informers to keep their eyes on gold smugglers.
Gold smuggling, a silent crime happening on a rampant scale in Ghana, is causing serious damage to the economy of Africa’s leading gold producer as the state is not benefiting as much as expected from its gold resources.
Sixty tonnes of gold worth $1.2 billion were smuggled out of Ghana from small-scale mining in 2022 alone, according to the minister of finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson.
Again, in 2024, Ghana exported an amount of gold worth almost $5billion from legal small-scale mining. But the value of gold smuggled out of Ghana from small-scale mining in that year alone was almost $10 billion.
The 10% reward scheme for whistleblowers, according to a member of the GoldBod technical committee, Dr Abdul Baasit Aziz Bamba, is a measure the government has introduced to help deal with this age-old plague.
“This is to serve as an incentive so that we’ll be law-abiding citizens who will help in ensuring that the GoldBod is able to achieve its objectives,” he told the gathering at Akayet Hotel.
What GoldBod is all about
Besides gold smuggling, Ghana is also losing billions of cedis annually through the gold black market (illegal gold trade) in the small-scale mining sector.
The country is also not realising the full benefit of its gold resources because royalty rates are low and some mining companies evade tax.
Further to the above, there is chaos or disarrangement in the gold-purchasing sector. At present, PMMC is not the only agency that has the mandate to purchase gold.
Other entities like the Bank of Ghana and the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) have a similar mandate while private aggregators as well as Ghanaians and foreigners with export licences purchase gold, too.
The gold-purchasing system lacks coordination and this disarray has been largely responsible for gold smuggling and the consequent impact on the economy.
The John Dramani Mahama administration initiated GoldBod as part of a broader agenda to revive and reset the economy. The agency is to take over the system with a mandate to regulate and restructure it. It will function as the sole buyer of gold from legal small-scale miners through licensed aggregators and local traders.
To give it the necessary legal backing to operate, a proposal called the “GoldBod Bill” has been laid before Parliament, awaiting approval next week. After the pending parliamentary approval of the bill, GoldBod will also have the legal rights as the sole assayer, seller and exporter of the mineral resource purchased from small-scale miners.
Objectives of GoldBod
GoldBod has been established to stabilise the downward slope of the national currency (which is about Gh¢16 to $1 today), to prevent foreign exchange losses and to maximise revenue from gold exports.
It will not take over the regulatory mandate of the Minerals Commission over the small-scale mining sector. But it will replace PMMC, according to Sammy Gyamfi, who added that it will also have a national security taskforce to help curtail gold smuggling and get rid of the gold black market.
“GoldBod is going to have inspectors and these are powerful people. They will be well dressed. They will have their uniform. They will have bulletproof vests. They will wear body cameras.
“They will have vehicles with trackers. We will monitor them so that they don’t abuse their power and harass innocent people, or extort gold from people. We will not allow them to do that. But they will enforce the law without fear or favour,” he said.
He reiterated the statement the minister of finance made when he inaugurated the GoldBod’s technical committee about two months ago that the government would “provide a revolving fund enough to purchase all gold from the small-scale mining sector.”
And he concluded with a warning: “I have the full support of the president to go after gold smugglers, and nobody will be spared. The day you are caught, you will lose all the money that you use to buy the gold— and you are going to jail.”
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
