Ghana’s Gold Board (GoldBod) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Samuel Gyamfi has given the firm assurance that the government would this year revoke the law that grants mining leases in forest reserves.
Speaking in a recent interview with Bernard Avleh on Channel1 TV, Gyamfi said the government would revoke the Legislative Instrument 2462 as soon as parliament returns from its current break.
The GoldBod CEO explained that the delay in the revocation was due to the emergence of divergent views on what the government needed to do.
There was a school of thought that revoking it could lead to a certain vacuum, and that what had to be cured was the discretion or power given to the president to grant mining leases for people to mine in protected forest zones, said the official.
He added, “Then there was another school of thought which said, let’s revoke the entire law and even if it creates a vacuum, we can come up with a new LI to deal with that, because LI 2462 is poisonous so it should go in its entirety.”
“I think those who make that argument, (that the LI 2462 must be revoked) have won, and we are a listening government. Before coming here, I spoke to my senior, the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Dominic Ayine, and he gave me the assurance that immediately parliament resumes that LI will be revoked,” he disclosed.
Moreover, Gyamfi asserted that the most important thing is that even before the revocation of the li, the government has begun the fight against the illegal mining menace, particularly, mining in forest reserves.
Enacted in November 2022, the state sponsored LI 2462 enacted as an “Environmental Protection instrument rather grants access to forest reserves for mining purposes.
During the 2024 election campaign, President John Dramani Mahama pledged to revoke the LI due to its destructive nature, and anti-illegal mining campaigners have been calling upon him since he took office in January to live up to this pledge.