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Gold mining thrives in Ghana, but people see little of returns

Gold mining thrives in Ghana, but people see little of returns

Written by Nana Otuo Tuesday, 26 April 2011 15:00

London (UK) – 23 April 2011 – The Times - Beneath a dilapidated shack Frank Ofori leaps casually into the entrance of a crumbling mineshaft that plunges 200ft into the earth.

With a torch strapped to his head and three sticks of dynamite in his back pocket he begins a ten-hour shift underground in the Kenyase mine camp, 200 miles (320km) north of Accra, where thousands of prospectors risk their lives in the hope of finding gold.

Mr Ofori skips over the wooden struts holding the makeshift tunnel together and disappears into an abyss.

Miners as young as 10 work in the squalid camp, exploited by gangmaster gold dealers who force them to endure back-breaking labour for less than a few pounds a month. Every day they risk suffocation, broken bones and injury from uncontrolled explosions.

The camp is reached through a flooded dirt-track carved into the rainforest, a busy thoroughfare crammed with people carrying generators and mining tools in wheelbarrows.

The sprawling shantytown in a clearing appears to be pockmarked by shelling. Workers tread carefully between the craters, that flood in the rainy season. Only decayed logs and sandbags give away where the mine entrances stand. At Kenyase there are no health-and-safety controls. No one wears a hard hat and at least 40 people died here last year.

The camp has sprung up in the past few years. When American company Newmont — one of the world’s largest gold companies — moved in to the area, thousands of prospectors followed. Mr Ofori spent two years digging his mineshaft with only shovels and pickaxes. “We usually go down there for ten hours at a time,” he said. “We take food and water with us. There is a network of tunnels underground, going on for miles. There are hundreds of us down there.”Across the site anyone who isn’t digging is sifting through gold ore. A mother with a baby strapped to her back looks through discarded rocks for a thin, yellow streak.

Teenage boys have abandoned their schooling to shovel earth into metal basins that girls carry to a clattering machine where the sludge is filtered.

Ayishitu Mohammed, 13, spends every day carrying heavy loads on her head through the opencast pit. “I would like to be a nurse but I haven’t finished at school,” she said. “That will never happen now.”

Last week Newmont approved a new gold project in Ghana. The Akyem mine is expected to produce 7.2 million ounces, with an annual output of up to 500,000 ounces. Such an immense undertaking will make Ghana Africa’s second biggest producer, after South Africa. Although gold accounts for 90 per cent of exports multinationals pay only 3 per cent royalties.

The charity Action Aid said that Ghana lost £700 million between 1990 and 2007 by not making companies to pay the maximum 12 per cent tax they could have required. In 2005 this would have been equivalent to paying off half the country’s debt. Kwame Badassi, a dealer, holds up a lump of rock containing a slither of gold. It has taken a miner two months to find and is worth only £4. “It is the big companies who have the biggest gold deposits. We just get the scraps,” he said.

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