Bogus mining data in Ghana poses danger

Illegal gold mining anxiety sweeps Ghana and disrupts election campaign messaging

Just weeks to the presidential elections in Ghana, middle-class concerns about illegal, irresponsible, and environmentally catastrophic gold mining have reached fever-pitch, completely derailing the campaign messaging themes of the leading political parties.

There are protests, strikes, threats of strikes, and hints of protests.

I have chronicled the journey of how Ghana got here in a previous essay.

Ghana made a Faustian pact to get to the top of Africa’s gold leagues

One way to look at the whole situation is that Ghana’s race to the top of the gold-production charts in Africa was fueled by the steroids of irresponsible mining.

When the country overtook South Africa in 2018 as Africa’s largest gold producer, both countries were bogged down in domestic fights over illegal mining.

Avoiding the costs and inconveniences of building strong institutional foundations for gold production helped accelerate Ghana’s massive gold rush, and ensuing gold boom.

Though one could also argue that the Ghanaian authorities were more mindful than their South African counterparts of the potential violence that could be unleashed if they pushed too far, the incontrovertible fact is that the country’s accommodating approach has boosted output.

The laxity in regulating small-scale mining in Ghana led to this sector accounting for over 40% of total production in 2018 even though Ghana purported at that time to have banned the practice, beginning in February 2017, and didn’t officially lift the “ban” until in December 2018.

Facts are always debatable in Ghana

The process by which “banned” miners somehow propelled Ghana into becoming Africa’s number one gold producer reflects a general situation where the “facts” of official policy and practice often diverge heavily from the reality on the ground. Elsewhere, I have described this “adhocracy” in detail.

Whether or not one can trust any of the official facts, data, and statistics, on the strength of which Ghanaian authorities are purporting (or is it, “pretending”?) to manage the mining industry is a question that has seen some dramatic responses in recent weeks.

After a high-profile opposition party figure accused the government of dishing out mining licenses like candy, it was natural to expect pushback from ruling party types. The more important issue of whether the nature of recent licenses, in terms of their environmental impact, have changed (most experts say, “yes”), took a backseat as the political party fanatics battled it out.

My own interest in analysing whether sudden upticks in license issuance can be matched with corresponding increases in the capacity at the Minerals Commission, the primary regulator, to properly scrutinise the applications and monitor mining activities at the approved concessions (answer: “no”) also got no traction.

After the Minister in charge sacked the 9 district mining inspectors in 2017, it took three years for the authorities to attempt reconstituting the inspectorate regime. Even now, insiders say that there are less than 40 qualified inspectors for the whole country.

The mysterious Minerals Commission license list

None of these policy matters received much attention. Instead, ruling party affiliates circulated a “fact sheet”, ostensibly containing data supplied by the Minerals Commission, in the name of one of Ghana’s fact-checking organisations purporting to show that the opposition party, when it was in government, issued more licenses than the current, ruling, party.

Fact-checking organisations dismissed the “fact sheet” as fake.

Partisan hacks tossing data about to upstage rivals is a tolerable feature of competitive democracies. And when you have been in the trenches of policy activism for nearly two decades as I have, you learn to triangulate data sources to arrive at the most accurate picture of any policy matter, anyway.

I myself miscommunicated on social media by not distinguishing among the eight different mining authorisations issued in Ghana in my bid to explain concerns that aggressive ramping up of licensing not matched by increase in the number of application reviewers and inspectors is one of the ways in which Ghana lost control of small-scale mining regulation.

We can all live with some data confusion in view of the well-known capacity issues at various levels of key institutions. Misspecification, definitional inconsistencies, and sheer sloppiness in transcription, are all known to occur.

The Minerals Commission joins the fray

What is harder to live with is government institutions themselves appearing to manipulate data and, even worse, hide and distort it to deflect attention from mismanagement or even malfeasance.

Two days ago, the Minerals Commission itself seemed to have joined the fray of pushing the discredited fact-sheet designed to push a single partisan and deceptive agenda around the number of licenses issued under the two successive governments. Devoid of any analytical context.

When public servants hired to serve in strictly non-partisan institutions, particularly regulatory agencies, start to do that, I always wonder whether they are, perhaps, in cahoots with some shadowy politicians in some underhand schemes. So, I decided to take an even closer look.

Why natural resource data manipulation is dangerous in Africa

It is important, first and foremost, to appreciate the political economy of mining data in Africa. For many, many, years, poor transparency and data manipulation enabled weak accountability and, through that, corruption and mismanagement of natural resources.

In some countries, such as Angola, poor data practices and lack of transparency have been linked to missing revenues assessed in billions of dollars.

To tackle this challenge, a new global standard called EITI was launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. In 2023, the standard was augmented to better serve stakeholders.

In Ghana, EITI (GHEITI) is managed by a local secretariat hosted at the Ministry of Finance but overseen by a steering committee with representatives from diverse institutions, including civil society organisations.

One general goal of the GHEITI process is to ensure that data is collected, analysed, and disseminated openly and transparently, involving multiple stakeholders, in order to ensure checks and balances.

It goes without saying that the potential abuse of data for partisan purposes or to deflect attention from serious policy challenges would go contrary to the GHEITI standard. GHEITI would seek to audit and validate data received for dissemination to avoid any such risks.