We’re better off with our gold in the soil - Tony Aidoo

The Head of Policy Monitoring and Evaluation at the Office of the President, Dr. Tony Aidoo, says he is surprised at expressions of surprise over revelations that some foreign mining companies in Ghana retain virtually all earnings.

He said that has always been the trend in the past – that Ghana’s natural resources are exploited for free – to the detriment of national development, safe for efforts by Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Gen. I.K. Acheampong who made some real efforts to increase national stake in those ventures.

Dr. Tony Aidoo told Radio Gold on Wednesday he would even prefer that the mineral remains untapped in the ground, so that local mining techniques are employed to exploit it, even if primitive, and means we can tap only five per cent of the lot.

It doesn’t make sense, he said, for other nationals to exploit the resources when we don’t benefit from it.

He was reacting to comments on the same platform by former Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Mike Allen Hamah, who said a law passed in 2003 which paved the way for the naked rape of the nation’s natural resources, had not been reviewed after initial attempts to do so, including the setting up of a committee.

But Dr. Tony Aidoo said the issue deserved more than a committee’s work, saying it is a national challenge that required a critical rethink.

The Ghana Mine Workers Union has described the revelation as a wake-up call to restore sanity in Ghana’s mining industry.