The African nation of Ghana, the largest gold producer on the continent, is accusing Chinese nationals of running illegal gold mines in addition to the billions of dollars China has legitimately invested in the industry.
Ghana has a long-running problem with galamsey, the local term for thousands of small illegal mines spread across the country. Other countries often describe such mines as “artisanal” operations. Artisanal mining has technically been legal in Ghana since 1989, but not for foreigners.
Many of the galamsey mines are located in the forested regions that produce cocoa, another major export for Ghana. The mines are notoriously devastating to the environment, causing major damage to rice and cocoa crops, and turning once-clear rivers into dirty brown sludge.
Many Ghanaians say illegal mining became much more widespread, and more ruinous, after Chinese businessmen began flooding into the country twenty years ago.
Before the Chinese arrived, illegal miners tended to be small bands of unemployed young men who used shovels and sieves to eke out a little gold from rivers and topsoil. There are far more illegal mines now, and they often use heavy machinery, water pumps, and chemicals like mercury and cyanide to wash soil and stones, poisoning local water tables in the process. Environmental groups complain the gold rush has grown into full-blown “ecocide.”
Residents of rural Ghana claim the Chinese also brought a great deal of seed money into illegal gold farming, paying police and soldiers to look the other way instead of hiding from them.
“When I see arrests by the military in poor communities, it’s just a symbolic gesture of appearing to maintain law and order. The people making big money out of it are in offices, not on the field,” a Ghanaian farmer complained to the BBC in October.
Over 50,000 Chinese nationals have migrated into Ghana since 2008 and a growing number of them have been arrested for illegal mining. China’s ambassador to Ghana, Tong Defa, claimed on Monday that Ghanaian artisanal miners have been hiring Chinese “migrant workers” to help with their operations, but experts in Ghana say the reverse is true: Chinese-run illegal mining operations are so productive, and destructive, that local artisanal miners are driven out of business. Many of them wind up going to work for Chinese bosses.
The most notorious example was Aisha Huang, dubbed the “Galamsey Queen” for her vast illegal mining operation. Huang was arrested in 2023 and sentenced to four and a half years in Ghanaian prison. The Chinese government portrays her as a rare renegade crook who got the justice she deserved, while many in Ghana say she was an example of Chinese influence on the galamsey trade.
Several officials in Ghana raised the intensity of the dispute over the past week by vowing to crack down on galamsey, whether the perpetrators are from Ghana or China.
Ghana Minerals Development Fund (MDF) administrator Hanna Louisa Bissiw said she would not hesitate to arrest Chinese nationals, although she was complimentary of the Chinese government’s willingness to assist with her efforts.
Former United Nations adviser Baffour Agyeman-Duah was more skeptical of the Chinese government, arguing that only collusion with government officials could enable so many Chinese workers to pour into Ghana’s illegal mining operations.
“This suggests a deliberate system must be in place to recruit and transport them here without issues at immigration entry points, then bus them to these forests. This is highly unusual,” Agyeman-Duah said.
In April, Ghana established a new regulatory body called the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) that took control of licensing for gold purchases. Beginning in May, GoldBod became the only entity authorized to buy or sell gold in Ghana. The move was explicitly intended to keep foreign interests out of the market, and tacitly meant to crack down on illicit activity by Chinese nationals.
“The GoldBod will ensure that Ghana harnesses the entire gold value chain – from extraction to refining, value addition, and marketing – both locally and internationally,” Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson declared in April.
China did not take the snub well, claiming its citizens had been scapegoated by an online disinformation campaign. Ambassador Tong suggested ungrateful Ghanaians were blaming China for their own problems.
“Chinese companies have built numerous buildings, roads and ports. Yet, do ordinary Ghanaians truly recognise these efforts, or do they consistently associate us solely with galamsey?” he said.
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