Economics Professor at the University of Ghana Business School, Godfred Alufar Bokpin, has said the substantial losses from the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) in its gold purchases for the Bank of Ghana (BoG) should not be overlooked.
According to Prof. Bokpin, while the benefits of the programme are substantial, the cost is also huge and cannot be ignored.
“I think that if you look at the benefit in terms of the macroeconomic stability and all of that, I will say that the benefit is quite substantial, but we must also recognise the cost, the huge cost associated with implementing this intervention,” he said on JoyNews on Tuesday, August 18, 2026,
According to him, the government, GoldBod, and the Bank of Ghana (BoG) have acknowledged that the current losses cannot continue.
“The reason I’m saying so is that the government itself, together with the Gold Board and the Bank of Ghana, recognise that these losses are not sustainable going forward,” he said.
Prof. Bokpin said an exit plan is being pursued to cut the losses associated with the programme. “You know that as part of the exit plan of the Bank of Ghana exiting this, there’s now an understanding where the government intends, through the Gold Board arrangement, to reduce these losses from about 17% or 14.5% to about 5% going forward,” he added.
His comments come amid concerns over losses incurred by GoldBod in its domestic gold purchase programme.
The Minority Leader in Parliament, Alexander Kwamena Afenyo-Markin, on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, at a press conference maintained that the Minority’s concerns over the reported GH¢22 billion loss linked to GoldBod are not politically motivated.
He said the concerns were being raised because Ghanaians deserved clear information on how public funds were being used in GoldBod’s domestic gold purchasing programme.
He said the figures cited by the Minority were contained in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report on Ghana and were therefore not figures manufactured by the opposition.
According to him, the IMF identified losses of about US$1.7 billion, equivalent to approximately GH¢22 billion, from the domestic gold purchasing programme in 2025.
He said the IMF attributed the losses to service and assay fees, discounts on gold sold to off-takers and exchange-rate differences between the rates used to purchase gold and the reference rate used by the Bank of Ghana for accounting purposes.
The Minority Leader said the reported losses should be subjected to public scrutiny because GoldBod played a central role in buying, aggregating, assaying and exporting the gold, while the Bank of Ghana provided the financing.
