There is a habit in Ghana’s intelligence, security and governance establishment that nobody really calls out, because it feels too normal to be a problem: we log events. Something happens, we write it down, file it, and wait for the next thing. That’s not intelligence. That’s a diary with a security classification stamped on it.
A diary doesn’t warn you. It doesn’t ask what this looks like in twenty-four months if nothing changes. It doesn’t tell you which of the twenty things happening right now will still be happening, and worse, three or five years out. It just records. And while we’ve been recording, galamsey has gone from a manageable irritant to a full-blown national catastrophe, taking our water bodies, our forests, and our health system down with it.
Here’s the part that should actually keep people up at night. Forget, for a moment, that selection onto task forces and postings to galamsey areas have quietly become the prize that well-connected people lobby for. None of this was inevitable. It’s the direct, traceable cost of not having a forward-looking intelligence posture, and not having the political will to act on one.
Every year we treated galamsey as an enforcement problem instead of an intelligence problem, our options got narrower. Prevention became containment. Containment is now sliding into “manage the damage.” What used to be cheap to fix has become catastrophically, generationally expensive. A governance failure has curdled into an environmental emergency that will outlast most of the officials currently pretending it’s under control.
So let’s try something different. Let’s actually run galamsey through the same machinery a serious state uses to think about any threat, not as an academic exercise, but as the template for how every major threat facing Ghana ought to be handled from here on.
First, we have to be honest about what we’re actually fighting
Galamsey stopped being an environmental story, or a policing problem you solve by arresting “chanfan” users, a long time ago. What we’re dealing with now is a full-scale organised crime enterprise, with an arms dimension, foreign financing, chieftaincy involvement, political protection, and money laundering happening at real scale. Call it anything smaller than that and you’ve already lost the plot.
And this is why the reclassification matters: you can’t disrupt a network like this with incident reports. A raid here, an arrest there, an excavator pushed into a pit or torched on camera, none of it touches the structure underneath, because nobody has actually mapped that structure. These are sophisticated organisations, with financing layers, protection layers, and built-in ways to dodge enforcement. Treating them as a string of unconnected incidents is like arresting the drug courier driver and calling the cartel dismantled.
What is actually needed first is the analytical groundwork. Before any enforcement, we need to understand these networks as the organisations they are, and answer the questions that matter: who are the key players actually controlling this ecosystem? How exactly are the Minerals Commission and the Lands Ministry tied into it? Who sits where, how does the money move, where does it land?
Which political and chieftaincy relationships are shielding which operations, and where do mercury and arms fit into the enforcement calculus? Only once that structure is actually on the table can you find the vulnerabilities worth striking, the choke points that collapse a network, instead of the visible edges that just get replaced within a week. Enforcement without that groundwork isn’t disruption. It’s theatre.
Step One: Name it in the National Security Strategy
We need an annual National Security Strategy from the Commander-in-Chief, and its whole job is to answer one blunt question: out of everything that could hurt this country, what deserves the state’s attention and resources? Galamsey belongs in that document, not as an environmental footnote, but as its own issue of concern, a threat with a trajectory, actors, and the capacity to spill into other things: political financing, violent extremism, organised crime, corruption of local governance, armed clashes over territory, foreign-financed extraction networks operating with total impunity.
Naming it there isn’t symbolic. It’s what forces the rest of the system, budgets, mandates, political attention, to treat galamsey as a security threat instead of a seasonal news story that flares up whenever a river turns brown enough, or whenever a politician or a journalist bottles water from a site for the cameras.
Step Two: Translate it into the National Intelligence Strategy
Once galamsey is named as a national security concern, the National Intelligence Strategy has to answer the next question: what does the intelligence community actually need to know, and how well do we know it right now? This is usually where our galamsey “intelligence” quietly turns out to be recycled newspaper reporting and after-the-fact incident logs, not a properly analysed, connected picture.
A real NIS would force honest answers to hard questions. Who’s actually financing these operations, and does that money originate here or offshore? Which foreign nationals and networks are involved, and how far do they reach into other illicit economies? Which local officials, chiefs, and security personnel are complicit, and is that opportunistic or structural?
What’s the real economic, environmental and public health trajectory if nothing changes, not guesswork, but actual modelled projections? None of that comes out of a diary. It only comes from an intelligence community explicitly tasked to build and maintain that picture continuously, whether or not galamsey happens to be in the news that week.
Step Three: The National Intelligence Collection Priority Framework
This is where strategy turns into something the collectors can actually use. A collection priority framework ranks what the state needs to know, so agencies aren’t each independently deciding galamsey matters this month and something else matters next month. If galamsey sits where it belongs, as a tier-one priority threat with real likelihood and real impact, it gets sustained collection effort, not a task force stood up every time a video goes viral.
It also fixes a coordination failure that’s quietly wasting half our capability: right now, several agencies are almost certainly collecting fragments of the same picture without knowing it, while whole dimensions of the threat go untouched. A priority framework doesn’t just tell agencies what to chase, it tells them what not to duplicate.
Step Four: The Intelligence Collection Plan, where the agencies actually have to talk to each other. This is where strategy becomes a division of labour. A serious collection plan on galamsey would look something like this:
The Bureau of National Intelligence, as the domestic lead, owns the domestic side of the structure we described earlier. It builds the human picture: the chieftaincy connections, the political protection, the smuggling, facilitation and connivance links running alongside it. That means mapping which traditional authorities are leasing out or shielding concessions and why, which officials and security personnel are on the take, and how that protection runs upward, because it doesn’t stop at the district level, and BNI is the only agency positioned to trace it that far.
The Research Department, as the external intelligence arm, picks up what BNI structurally can’t. It owns the foreign financing dimension: where the money and the equipment come from outside Ghana, which foreign nationals and networks are running or bankrolling operations, and how those networks tie into the wider criminal architecture across West Africa. RD is also best placed to follow the laundering once it leaves the country.
The National Signals Bureau, as the signals agency, provides the technical backbone: communications and financial intelligence that maps the networks BNI and RD are building human pictures of, and either confirms or challenges what’s coming in from the ground. It also owns the money laundering picture in its most concrete form, following transactions through shell arrangements, front businesses, and cross-border transfers. This is where the political-protection and foreign-financing threads get corroborated, or exposed as wrong.
Defence Intelligence brings the geospatial and operational-terrain picture, and owns the arms dimension: satellite and aerial monitoring of excavation sites and movement into forest reserves and mining concessions, and direct visibility on the weapons and armed protection built into these operations. This is the piece that can turn an enforcement raid from a policing exercise into a security operation with casualties on the table.
None of this works in isolation. The whole point of a collection plan is fusion, one picture built from four different vantage points, each doing the specific piece of structural work the threat actually demands, refreshed continuously instead of rebuilt from scratch every time a crisis grabs public attention again.
The point isn’t galamsey. It’s the muscle.
Galamsey is the illustration here, not the whole argument. The real point is that Ghana needs a forward-looking intelligence architecture, and galamsey is just the most visible, most expensive proof of what its absence costs us. If we had been running this process even twenty years ago, threat identified, strategy set, priorities ranked, collection plan executed and fused, we might still be in “prevention.” Instead we’re in “damage control,” and every year we spend keeping a diary instead of forecasting pushes the bill higher.
The uncomfortable truth is none of this is exotic. It’s standard practice in any intelligence community that takes itself seriously. We’re not short on the concepts. We’re short on the discipline to apply them before the crisis, instead of narrating it afterward.
Nana Attobrah Quaicoe
About the Author
The author, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, is an Intelligence and National Security Analyst, a former Director General of the Bureau of National Intelligence (2022–2025), and writes on national security and intelligence sector reform, risk, integrity assessment, and institutional governance in the Ghanaian context.
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