Ing. Wisdom Gomashie, a renowned mining consultant, has stepped forward to challenge the recent justifications provided by Senyo Hosi regarding the financial losses incurred by the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod).
In a sharply worded critique, Ing. Gomashie characterized the narrative which suggests Ghana failed to benefit from gold trade prior to GoldBod’s 2025 inception as fundamentally misleading and a distortion of the sector’s fiscal history.
He contends that the attempt to rationalize state-level deficits by ignoring long-standing structural successes ignores the reality of previous policy interventions that successfully targeted gold smuggling and reserve building.
“To assert that, Ghana wasn’t making gains from the gold trade prior to the establishment of GOLDBOD in 2025 is misleading. According to your own COMTRADE DATA, you decided to conveniently cherry-pick data to make your case. Therefore the GOLDBOD is a continuous formalization drive and not a novelty in curbing smuggling in Ghana.”
Ing. Wisdom Gomashie
Expanding on his technical rebuttal, the mining consultant accused Mr. Senyo Hosi of selective data usage, specifically alleging that the 2022 COMTRADE dataset was used as a convenient outlier to overshadow the improvements realized in 2023.
Ing. Gomashie pointed out that gold smuggling is not a contemporary “2022-2023” phenomenon but a systemic issue documented in literature, noting that reports from Iwatch indicate losses exceeding US$6 billion between 2013 and 2016.
He argued that the peak in 2022 was largely a result of the government’s then 3% withholding tax on exports, a “fatal” policy that was only corrected in 2023 when the tax was halved and the Domestic Gold Buying Programme was fully implemented.
Structural Realities and the UAE Trade Discrepancy
The debate further intensifies over claims regarding a 33% smuggling rate into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during the 2022-2023 period.
Ing. Gomashie noted that because the UAE is not an LBMA-regulated regime, it serves as the primary destination for Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM) exports, making data disaggregation vital for a fair assessment.
He maintained that discrepancies in ASM exports to the UAE have existed since 2014 and actually began showing improvement in 2023 following the reduction of export taxes to 1.5%.
By failing to separate the data by year, he argues that analysts are “blurring gains made by the previous government” in tackling the trade’s structural imbalances.
The Impact of Inherited Reforms on Mineral Output
Highlighting the success of existing frameworks, Ing. Gomashie underscored that the Domestic Gold Buying Programme was the true foundation for finding a permanent solution to smuggling.
He cited the 2024 Performance of the Ghana Mining Industry report by the Ghana Chamber of Mines, which revealed a massive 70.1% increase in attributable output from the small-scale sector surging from 1.1 million ounces in 2023 to 1.9 million ounces in 2024.
This growth represents the second-highest level since the sector’s formalization, occurring well before the establishment of the current GoldBod structure.
Continuous Formalization versus Institutional Novelty
Ultimately, the consultant insists that any assertion framing gold smuggling as a crisis that only worsened in 2022 is factually flawed. He maintains that the current state-led aggregation through GoldBod is a “continuous formalization drive” rather than a groundbreaking novelty.
For the extractive industry to remain transparent, he posits that observers must recognize that the tools for curbing smuggling such as competitive tax regimes and domestic purchasing programs were already operational and yielding results before the current institutional losses were recorded.
READ ALSO: BoG Unveils MPC Calendar for 2026 as Optimism for Year Grows
