The Minority in Parliament has called for a bipartisan ad-hoc parliamentary investigation into what it describes as a troubling $214 million loss incurred by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) under the Gold-for-Reserves programme.
Addressing journalists in Accra on Monday, December 29, Ofoase Ayirebi MP and former Minister for Information, Hon. Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, said the magnitude of the reported losses makes a thorough and transparent probe unavoidable. According to him, the situation must not be dismissed with technical explanations that ignore the realities facing taxpayers.
“You must be clear, a loss of $214 million has already been made,” he stressed, warning that the figure “will be about $300 million at the end of the year,” if urgent corrective measures are not taken. He added that “the people of Ghana cannot be taken for fools by some long-winded statements seeking to parry this tragedy away.”
Hon Oppong Nkrumah criticised what he described as the government’s reliance on repackaging existing programmes without addressing deeper economic challenges. “The truth about this government is that they have not introduced any superior economic ideas,” he argued, insisting that most initiatives are “rebranding without the requisite competence and attention to the structural issues,” which he warned could prove “disastrous in the end.”
The Minority further accused the government of benefiting from economic frameworks established by the previous administration without demonstrating innovation of its own. He cited policies such as Gold for Reserves, Gold for Oil and Gold for Forex, noting that even these are now yielding losses that “you, the taxpayer, will have to pay at the end of the day.”
He also criticised the restructuring of the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC) and related institutions under the Ghana Gold Board, stating that government “simply took the PMMC and the work that MIF was doing and decided to restructure it under the gold board and quickly pass a bill to grant it sweeping powers over all small-scale gold, plus 20% of all other produced gold by large-scale miners.”
The Minority insists that only a full, independent parliamentary inquiry can establish how the losses occurred and whether the management of the programme has been prudent and transparent.
Parliament is expected to formally consider the request for the ad-hoc committee in the coming days.
