Economist Adu Owusu Sarkodie says Ghana’s GH¢22 billion gold-purchase losses were a deliberate cost of policy, as Parliament’s Minority pushes for a full inquiry into the Bank of Ghana programme.
Sarkodie made the case for the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) at a public discussion on its costs and benefits, arguing that losses were effectively built into its design. He said the programme was structured to pull gold from artisanal and small-scale miners into official channels by offering attractive pricing, favourable exchange rates and tax incentives, including the removal of a 1.5% withholding tax on small-scale mining. Those incentives, he said, existed specifically to outbid smugglers and foreign buyers for the miners’ gold, and inevitably carried a cost.
The debate has taken on political weight since the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its sixth and final review of Ghana’s Extended Credit Facility programme completed in July, found that the scaled-up DGPP generated losses of more than $1.7 billion, or roughly GH¢22 billion, in 2025 alone, equivalent to about 1.5% of the country’s GDP. The Fund said the losses contributed to a widening of the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) negative equity position, which reached 6.7% of GDP by the end of last year, and it has urged the central bank to end quasi-fiscal operations and hand the programme fully to the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod). The programme did add to reserves: Ghana’s gross international reserves, boosted in part by roughly $3.9 billion in gold purchases, ended 2025 at $11.9 billion.
Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has seized on the IMF findings to demand a full parliamentary inquiry into the losses, questioning the service fees, discounts and exchange-rate spreads applied to gold bought from miners and sold on to off-takers. “This is a structural bleeding of our national purse,” he said, invoking Article 257(6) of the Constitution, which vests the country’s mineral resources in the president in trust for the people, to argue the losses require parliamentary scrutiny regardless of which institution’s books absorbed them.
GoldBod chief executive Sammy Gyamfi has pushed back on suggestions that GoldBod itself caused the shortfall, saying the IMF report attributes the losses to the Bank of Ghana’s gold sales under the DGPP, not to GoldBod’s own operations, which he said produced a GH¢907 million operational surplus in 2025.
Sarkodie, for his part, said responsibility for the programme’s financial outcomes belongs with the central bank rather than GoldBod, since the DGPP is fundamentally a Bank of Ghana initiative and its results are recorded in the BoG’s audited accounts. He argued the more useful debate is not whether losses occurred but how to shrink them, urging a review of service charges, exchange-rate differentials and tax incentives to find a lower-cost way to keep building reserves and curbing smuggling. Governments and central banks routinely have to weigh policy goals against their financial cost, he said, and Ghana’s task now is optimising the programme rather than abandoning it.
