There is a word Ghanaians use when an institution is not just failing but betraying its purpose. The word is “useless“.
For the Minerals Commission, it fits perfectly.
A regulator that cannot regulate. A local shepherd protecting the turf of a foreign company whose hands are stained with the blood of Ghanaians killed and permanently disabled through recurrent regulatory breaches.
A referee that wears the jersey of one team while sitting in the dock as its co-defendant. That is what the Minerals Commission has become.
Call it what it is: ineffectual, incompetent, compromised, complicit, and utterly worthless to the Ghanaian people it claims to serve.
Consider the massacre that took place in the Talensi District in 2019.
That year, Shaanxi Mining — now cleverly rebranded as Earl International Gold Limited — carried out a reckless blast that killed 16 Ghanaians in a single day. Sixteen fathers, brothers, sons buried in the dust of Talensi because a foreign company decided Ghanaian safety rules did not apply to it.
And here is where the betrayal becomes institutional. After 16 Ghanaian citizens died, there was no prosecution. No jail time. No compensation to families. Nothing.
What did the Minerals Commission, the so-called regulator, do?
Its own Inspectorate Division, in its own report, found Shaanxi culpable for multiple criminal violations: storing explosives underground without approval, blasting without an approved safety code, failing to provide blasting notices, failing to record blasting in the shift log, and appointing a supervisor who could not even communicate with his patrol team.
The punishment for 16 dead Ghanaians? A paltry US$40,000 fine. Not a single pesewa of compensation was recommended for the 16 bereaved families. The entire US$40,000 went into state coffers in Accra. The graves remain in Talensi.
Then the Commission did the unthinkable. It rewarded the company. Even more troubling is the questionable silence of the Paramount Chief of Talensi as his own people suffer death and permanent disability from the Chinese company’s operations.
Today in Talensi, Earl International trucks still haul gold out of the same earth that swallowed 16 Ghanaians. The $40,000 fine is in Accra. The 16 graves are in Talensi. That is the justice of the Minerals Commission.
But it gets worse. That same Commission that found Shaanxi/Earl guilty of conducting a reckless blast that claimed 16 lives went ahead to recommend it for a large-scale mining licence while small-scale licences for several local mining groups were still valid and active on the same land.
How do you grant a large-scale concession over existing, lawful small-scale concessions? Only a useless, or compromised, regulator does that.
And now we have descended into legal absurdity: A Defendant Ordering a Plaintiff to Vacate. There is an ongoing civil case in which Earl International is a co-defendant alongside the Minerals Commission and three others.
The suit was filed at a High Court in Bolgatanga by the Managing Director of Nanlamtaaba Enterprise, Zongdan Boyak Kolog, a Talensi-born licensed miner widely known as Polo.
While that case is still pending — while ownership is sub judice or still before a judge presiding over a court of competent jurisdiction— the Minerals Commission that is a defendant in the case wrote a letter to the Managing Director of Nanlamtaaba ordering him to vacate the concession for the Chinese company.
Who does that? In what law school does a defendant issue a quit order to a plaintiff over the same property that is before a judge? It is contemptuous. It is lawless. It is an insult to the judiciary. Many development watchers warned that the action could throw the entire district into a bloody turmoil. And Talensi, indeed, was almost plunged into chaos this week after tension flared in Talensi following the Minerals Commission’s action.
In Talensi, the Minerals Commission itself has become a major source and a major driver of an ongoing wave of conflicts — owing to controversial and dangerous actions it continues to take in favour of Chinese companies whose history of bribery is well documented and undeniable.
What makes it more shameful is the role of the Minerals Commission itself, which is also a co-defendant in that same suit. The regulator that is supposed to be neutral is standing in the dock with a foreign company accused of trespass, while the same regulator writes eviction letters to a Ghanaian licence holder in favour of a foreign company with a documented history of serious violations and wrongdoing.
The Minerals Commission shows it has taken sides. It says nothing worthwhile. It does nothing worthwhile. It only keeps taking decisions that make serious-minded individuals and institutions question its integrity, fairness, honesty, credibility, professionalism and competence nationally and internationally.
It keeps inflicting shame on a large scale on the nation, both domestically and internationally. This is how the Commission continues to disgrace the country home and abroad.
This media house holds the view that President John Dramani Mahama must, as a matter of urgency, dismiss the Acting CEO of the Minerals Commission, Isaac Andrews Tandoh, for superintending over this confusion and complicity.
If the President’s reset agenda means anything, it must be felt now at the Minerals Commission — a body that has proven it has lost all moral right to regulate.
We further hold that the High Court Judge presiding over the pending suit between Nanlantaaba Enterprise (Plaintiff) and Earl International Group (Ghana) Gold Limited, the Minerals Commission and three others (Defendants) should consider committing the Acting CEO for contempt of court and of the Judiciary as a whole.
Source: Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana/West Africa
