To understand galamsey, you must first accept a simple truth: nobody wakes up in a village, stretches their arms, yawns, and decides to dig for gold on land that doesn’t belong to them. You lie bad! Galamsey only happens because someone with land is willing to give it, and someone with money and machines is ready to take it. When these two shake hands, sometimes over schnapps, sometimes over silence, the earth tremble.
The People with the Land
Land in rural Ghana is not like a city kiosk you can break into and claim by force. It is held with deep authority; by an Abusuapayin, a private owner, or a chief whose ancestors probably received that land in a war, or through a story involving bravery, magic, or a very strategic marriage. Nobody can simply show up with a shovel or excavator and start mining without permission. So anytime you see a mining pit somewhere in the bush, do not blame ghosts or destiny. A human being, with a name and an ID card, agreed to give that land out. It is not the boys you see lined up and paraded that went there by themselves. Someone gave them the permission.
Governments lost the people with the land
Legally, Ghana’s minerals belong to the state. On paper, the state gives mining rights and pays royalties to landowners. In reality, those royalties often behave like stubborn visitors: they delay, they disappear and come only when they feel like it. Some landowners wait months or years for their share. Others get trapped in family litigation that could last longer than the lifetime of a cocoa tree.
Speaking of cocoa trees; those noble plants that bring Ghana billions, they sit on land that belongs to farmers who have spent decades sweating under the sun, hoping for a better tomorrow. The irony is painful: cocoa makes the world smile through chocolate, yet many cocoa farmers in Ghana rarely smile themselves. The state controls the buying and selling of cocoa so tightly that farmers cannot even sell a bag on their own without risking prison. Meanwhile, the inputs the state is supposed to supply; fertilizer, chemicals, seedlings, sometimes vanish into thin air or arrive so late that even the weeds are no longer interested.
Cocoa trees were diseased with scarce inputs in 2018 at Sureso, Amenfi West
Cocoa farmers sold their farms to galamsey operators for quick returns
Galamsey operators took down the farms in search of gold
Over the last twelve years, countless cocoa farms have battled diseases with little help. Labour has grown scarce as young people escape the farms like prisoners breaking out of jail. And the bitter truth that echoes in villages from Wassa to Sefwi is this: “Cocoa will not make you rich; it will only keep you busy and tired.”
Many farmers live in mud houses, watch the city on TV, and wonder if they will ever enjoy the things urban dwellers take for granted. The youth cannot wait to escape the farm life. Landowners kept calling on government for assistance, but government, as always, had other priorities that sounded more urgent in Accra.
Then Came the People With Cash and Machines
Just when the rural economy was gasping for air, a group of men arrived with shiny excavators, fat wallets, loud promises, and an accent that said, “We have come to change your life.” They whispered to landowners that gold prices were rising globally and that their land contained gold; sweet, yellow, life-changing gold. They assured the landowners that they were ready to pay everything directly without the state taking its share first or delaying for eternity.
To cocoa farmers, they delivered a message that bordered on comedy and tragedy:
“Your cocoa trees are dying because the gold beneath them is suffocating them. Release the gold so the land can breathe!”
It sounded ridiculous, but the money on the table was very real. They counted the cocoa trees one by one, calculated compensation with smiles wider than the Pra River, and promised a single payment large enough to build a three-storey house in Asankragua, Bogoso, Offin Dunkwa or Osino. They painted pictures of a future where farmers no longer died poor or lived in huts their ancestors left behind.
They assured them that their sons and daughters would find endless employment at the mining sites. In fact, they said, there would be so much work that more youth would have to be imported from other parts of Ghana or even neighboring countries. The miners made the kind of promises that made rural poverty look like a temporary inconvenience.
And truthfully, the math seemed to support the dream. Instead of making money only twice a year during cocoa harvest, landowners could now earn daily. Debt vanished. Mud houses transformed into mansions with iron gates. Before long, the rural farmer was holding an iPhone 15 and driving a car that the average Accra resident could only admire from afar.
Illegal mining; yes, illegal mining, achieved in a few years what cocoa and state royalties could not achieve in half a century. Rural life declared its economic independence without filing any formal notice to the government.
The Chickens Come Home to Roost
But life, as our grandparents warned, always balances its accounts. The price for this sudden prosperity soon arrived; uninvited and unforgiving. Cocoa output has been dropping. Chemicals used in mining seeped into farms, poisoning surviving trees. The youth abandoned agriculture entirely.
How River Ankobra at Prestea has become
Rivers that once ran clear enough for children to play in now look like overboiled tea. The Pra, Ankobra, Offin, and Birim became sludge-coloured streams. Downstream communities lost access to clean water, fish disappeared, boats could no longer pass, and water treatment plants began breaking down like exhausted patients with chronic illness.
Some communities now ration water as if living in a desert, not in the heart of a tropical country blessed with abundant rainfall.
Government deployed the military and police to fight the laborer
To stop the trend, the government did what it often does: it sent in soldiers. These soldiers burned excavators with patriotic enthusiasm, chased miners, and arrested laborers who were simply trying to escape poverty. But strangely, the real decision-makers; the landowners who released the land and the financiers who supplied the machines, somehow managed to remain invisible.
Galamsey Taskforce arrests laborers
Since 2018, this type of military interventions has intensified. In 2026, we will continue same path, so we’ve allocated Gh150million to be spent by NAIMOS. How I wish this will be spent on intelligence picking and arrest of the landowners and financiers to account for their acts in our mines!
By: Obrempong Yaw Ampofo