The GH¢22 Billion Question: NPP's GoldBod Offensive and the Politics of the Squeeze

The New Patriotic Party's Minority Caucus in Parliament has opened its sharpest line of attack yet against the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), and this time the ammunition is not a social media rumor but a citation from the International Monetary Fund. At a press conference on Tuesday, August 18, Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin accused the state gold-buying institution of imposing a GH¢22 billion roughly $1.7 billion, or about 1.5 percent of Ghana's GDP loss on the Bank of Ghana through the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) in 2025.

The squeeze: two institutions, one gold trade

Afenyo-Markin's argument is structural rather than merely accusatory, and it is worth following closely because it is designed to survive GoldBod's rebuttals. His claim is that GoldBod buys, aggregates, assays and exports the gold, earns fees for doing so, and then points to its own healthy books GH¢5.4 billion in overall surplus for 2025 as proof the programme works.

Meanwhile, he argues, the trading losses generated by the same transactions discounted sales to off-takers, exchange-rate spreads, service and assay fees land on the Bank of Ghana's balance sheet rather than GoldBod's.

"You cannot claim the upside of a trade and disown a downside," he said, describing the arrangement as GoldBod using the central bank as an "alter ego" to evade accountability, and warning of "post-regime accountability" for officials once political power changes hands.

The figure itself traces to IMF Country Report No. 26/213, which the Minority says shows a sharp escalation from the $214 million loss the Fund first flagged for the nine months to September 2025. Afenyo-Markin has framed this as vindication that the Minority's earlier warnings including on GoldBod's fee structure, which he says was subsequently revised were correct, and has announced a parliamentary motion demanding a full-scale debate when the House resumes, appealing to the Majority not to use its numbers to block scrutiny.

GoldBod and its allies push back
Sammy Gyamfi, GoldBod's CEO, has rejected the framing outright, citing the Auditor-General's audited 2025 accounts, which record an operational surplus of roughly GH¢907 million to GH¢909.7 million and an overall surplus of GH¢5.4 billion. He has repeatedly stressed that these are the Auditor-General's own figures, not GoldBod's internal claims, and that no losses have been recorded since the institution's establishment in April 2025.

The Institute of Fiscal Policy Governance went further, arguing the Minority is conflating two separate legal entities GoldBod and the Bank of Ghana each have distinct statutory functions and balance sheets and challenging the Minority to produce a transaction-by-transaction reconciliation or Auditor-General evidence attributing the GH¢22 billion figure specifically to GoldBod rather than to the central bank's broader Domestic Gold Purchase Programme.

Notably, GoldBod itself announced on August 11 that it had ended its role as a buying agent for the Bank of Ghana, having stopped receiving BoG financing since March 2026 in favor of raising funds directly from commercial banks and off-takers a shift the Minority says raises its own questions about why the original structure was discontinued if it was sound. The IMF has separately urged the Bank of Ghana to exit such quasi-fiscal activity altogether and fully transfer the programme to GoldBod.

Politics of the squeeze
The dispute sits inside a wider pattern this column has tracked: the NPP, now in opposition and mid-way through its own internal reorganization ahead of 2028, has increasingly used GoldBod Vice President Bawumia's own brainchild in concept, ironically as a proxy battleground for a broader argument about transparency, galamsey-linked gold, and currency stabilization under the NDC government.

Government-aligned voices have accused the Minority of "rewriting economic history" and weaponizing hypocrisy, given the NPP's own record of Eurobond borrowing under Ken Ofori-Atta. Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams added a different register to the debate over the weekend, urging Ghanaians to pray for GoldBod against what he called a "powerful movement" of entrenched illegal gold interests resisting regulation.

What is not in dispute is that GoldBod has become the year's most contested economic institution in Ghanaian politics celebrated by the government as proof of monetary sovereignty and currency stabilization, and treated by the opposition as either evidence of an accounting shell game or, at minimum, an institution whose books require far more independent scrutiny than they have received. Parliament's resumption will determine whether that scrutiny becomes a formal, evidence-based debate or another round of dueling press statements.

This report draws on parliamentary statements, IMF Country Report No. 26/213, and reporting from Graphic Online, Ghanaian Times, Ghana MPS, Ghanamma, and Adomonline.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

[email protected]
+233-555-275-880
References
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