Free-for-All Galamsey: Murdering Churches for Gold

A Story That Stopped My Heart
On Friday, October 30th, 2026, I sat in the hall at the Women’s Center, Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) Headquarters, Osu, as part of the audience for the 97th Anniversary Lecture of the Council, expecting the usual comfort of such gatherings: solemn words, measured reflections and nodding heads. Then the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rev. Dr. Abraham Nana Opare-Kwakye, who delivered the Lecture, told a story that made me cringe to the point of mortification.

Reverend Dr. Opare-Kwakye who is also the Vice Chairman of the Christian Council, delivered the Lecture on behalf of the Council Chairman, Reverend Enoch Nii Narh Thompson (President of the Ghana Baptist Convention), who is out of the country on an international assignment

According to Reverend Dr. Opare-Kwakye, inter alia, one of the Presbyterian Churches (identity not disclosed for obvious reasons), has been asked to relocate because the Traditional Authorities in conjunction with some locals say that the land on which the church sits has gold reserves so they need the land for mining activities. Yes; they want the land for galamsey and so the church must be relocated.

As it is, the reason was not to construct a road, hospital, school etc.: The land beneath the church is needed immediately for galamsey.

Let that sink in. A community is looking at a House of God, a place where babies are christened, couples are wed, and the dead are laid to rest with hymns, and is suddenly seeing only a patch of earth sitting on top of gold – no longer a revered place of worship.

This the extent to which galamsey has reached very disturbing immoral dizzying heights in the Republic of Ghana.

The Boldness of Greed

There was a time when galamsey hid in the bush. Its operators worked at night, ashamed, looking over their shoulders and sneaking in-and-out of the sight of society to engage in their illegal activities.

Today it has grown bold. It no longer sneaks; it brazenly makes demands. Galamsey now monstrously walks up to church doors and says: “Move. The gold is more important than your God.”

This is what an apocalyptic menace looks like when it matures. First, it swallowed the farmlands. Then it poisoned the rivers. Then it ate the forests. Now it has turned its eyes toward God’s sanctuary itself.

Because of the greed of some people and evil/shameless politicians who are the main architects of such acts, we are now telling God the Creator to go to hell and rot there because we want to destroy all His creation and so we do not care anymore about His sacred sanctuaries.

The Land We Are Leaving Behind

Picture it. Rivers that once ran clear, where children bathed and women drew water at dawn, now flow thick and brown like diluted mud, laced with mercury and cyanide. Cocoa farms that fed families for generations lie gutted, replaced by yawning pits filled with stagnant, poisoned water. Great trees that stood for centuries have been reduced to stumps and ash. Where birdsong once greeted the morning, there is now the grinding roar of excavators.

The water that reaches our taps grows dirtier. The fish are vanishing. The farmer stands at the edge of what was once his field and cannot tell where his father's boundary used to be, because there is no ground left, only craters.

And the young men, many of them desperate, many of them lured by quick money, dig deeper into the wounds of their own motherland, while a few powerful hands collect the real harvest.

A Betrayal of the Sacred

In our culture, land is not merchandise. It is inheritance. It is where our ancestors sleep. It is the trust handed to us by those who came before, to be handed on whole to those who come after. In our faith, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. We were placed in the garden to tend it, not to strip it bare.

To demand that a church be moved so the ground can be torn open for gold is more than a property matter. It is a spiritual confession. It says we have crowned a new god, and its name is money.

Of course, if you are now hearing conscienceless political actors who once cried against galamsey, now telling us that they cannot stop galamsey and have asked all and sundry to enter the pits illegally without license, why would churches not become targets for mass murdering just to satisfy the desires of evil-minded and greedy souls?

How Can God Bless a Land We Are Destroying?

This is the question that kept me awake after that lecture.

Every Sunday we fill our churches, we sing, we pray, we fast, we declare Ghana blessed. We ask God to heal our economy, protect our children, and prosper our land. Yet with the other hand we are poisoning the very rivers He gave us, slaughtering the very forests He planted, and now evicting the very congregations that pray for us.

Everyday across the nation, especially in our schools, we sing the National Anthem, and ask God to bless our Homeland Ghana and make us great and strong.

How can we ask for rain while we pollute the streams? How can we ask for bread while we destroy the farms? How can we ask for a blessing upon a homeland we are consciously, deliberately, laying waste daily?

A nation cannot loot creation with one hand and lift the other in prayer and expect Heaven not to notice the gross hypocrisy and outright disrespect to God the Creator.

The Church Must Not Move, and Neither Must Our Conscience

To the Christian Council, to every denomination, to the chiefs, the imams, the pastors, the assembly members, the security agencies and the politicians who know exactly who is behind these operations: the time for polite statements is over.

• The Church must speak, loudly and without fear, even when the offenders sit in its own pews.
• Traditional leaders must refuse to sell the future, because land held in trust is not theirs to auction.
• The State must enforce the law, and it must do so against the powerful and the connected, not only the small and the poor.
• Every citizen must stop being a spectator, for silence in the face of ecocide is a form of consent.

The Final Question

A generation from now, our grandchildren will stand at the edge of a pit where a church once stood, where a river once ran, where a forest once whispered. They will ask what we were doing while it happened.

I pray our answer will not be: We were praying.

Gold can be mined, melted, and spent. But a poisoned river cannot be bought back. A murdered forest cannot be recalled. And a nation that evicts God from His own sanctuary for the sake of gold has already lost something far more precious than anything buried in the ground.

Ghana, wake up. Before there is nothing left to bless.

The excessive GREED of a few wicked politicians and their assigns has reached an insane level and maybe just maybe, we must begin to pray for God to pour His wrath upon such people as He did in the days of Old.

THIS NONSENSE MUST STOP NOW!!!
Samuel Koku Anyidoho
(Founder and CEO, MILLS Institute for Public Policy Advocacy & Transformational Leadership Development).

Saturday, October 31, 2026.