Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants -Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
In my last article, I established that the US$1.7 billion loss reported for 2025 arose from the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP), and I argued that the accusation against GoldBod CEO Sammy Gyamfi amounted to a witch hunt. The sequel is to examine what caused the loss, why it escalated so dramatically as the programme expanded, and what lessons Ghana can learn to prevent a recurrence.
The DGPP was launched on 17 June 2021, during Dr Ernest Addison’s tenure as Governor of the BoG, with the stated objective of increasing Ghana’s gold holdings as part of its foreign-exchange reserves. The programme was subsequently scaled up significantly. The BoG itself describes the DGPP as having been launched on 17 June 2021.
The scale of that expansion is striking. According to data supplied by the BoG in response to an RTI request, total gold purchases under the DGPP increased from 56.47 tonnes in 2024, valued at approximately US$4.07 billion, to 110.99 tonnes in 2025, valued at about US$11.4 billion. The IMF separately estimates that approximately 104 tonnes of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASGM) gold, worth US$10.9 billion, were purchased and exported through the programme in 2025.
The IMF estimates that DGPP-related losses exceeded US$1.7 billion in 2025, equivalent to about 17% of the value of doré gold sold by the BoG. It also reports that 2024 DGPP losses were almost US$400 million. However, there is an important qualification: about one-third of the 2024 loss was related to the Gold-for-Oil (G4O) component, while the 2025 loss was almost entirely associated with Gold-for-Reserves (G4R) doré transactions.
Consequently, comparing the headline US$1.7 billion loss in 2025 with the almost US$400 million loss in 2024 produces a 325% increase, but it is not a perfectly like-for-like comparison. If approximately one-third of the 2024 loss is excluded as G4O-related, the comparable 2024 loss would be roughly US$267 million. On that basis, the 2025 loss was more than six times the comparable 2024 amount.
Even with that qualification, the underlying question remains compelling: why did losses grow so much faster than the physical volume of gold purchased? Total purchases nearly doubled, from 56.47 tonnes to 110.99 tonnes, while the reported loss increased by more than six times on a more comparable G4R basis.
The IMF identifies three principal components of the losses: service and assay fees paid to GoldBod, discounts on gold sold to off-takers, and, most importantly, exchange-rate losses arising from the spread between the forex-bureau rate paid to purchase the gold and the cedi reference rate used for BoG accounting.
The IMF also cautions that part of the reported loss represents valuation effects rather than an equivalent cash loss.
This raises an obvious question. If Ghana’s macroeconomic conditions improved significantly in 2025, why did the losses associated with the programme increase so dramatically? The IMF itself notes that the rapid expansion of the DGPP coincided with, and arguably contributed to, significant macroeconomic stabilisation and a substantial accumulation of international reserves.
What economic structure produced such losses? Which costs were unavoidable? Which could have been negotiated? Were the off-taker discounts commercially justified? Was the exchange-rate mechanism properly designed? Who approved the structure, and what risk controls were in place as the programme expanded?
The economics appear to have contained a potential loss chain:
Gold purchase → forex-bureau exchange rate → assay/service costs → other operating or financing costs → off-taker discount → sale proceeds → accounting/valuation effect.
But these mechanisms existed in both 2024 and 2025. So why did the losses increase so dramatically, particularly on a more comparable G4R basis, when Ghana’s macroeconomic conditions were improving and the cedi had appreciated significantly during parts of 2025? The IMF reported that strong external-sector performance and repeated foreign-exchange intervention contributed to a substantial appreciation of the cedi against the U.S. dollar between November 2024 and May 2025.
Each link in the chain deserves scrutiny.
The IMF nevertheless acknowledges that the DGPP contributed significantly to Ghana’s accumulation of international reserves and helped provide foreign-exchange inflows during a period of severe external pressure. Gross international reserves reached US$11.9 billion, or about four months of imports, at the end of 2025, with the scaling-up of the DGPP playing an important role.
The programme therefore had a legitimate strategic objective. The question is whether Ghana achieved that objective at an excessive economic cost.
The cost need not be financial alone. Major national programmes must be assessed within a wider cost framework, including their environmental and social consequences. There is, without doubt, a relationship between the expansion of gold production and the worsening degradation and turbidity of Ghana’s water bodies. That environmental cost must form part of the national conversation about gold purchasing and gold production. That is where the proper debate should be.
Buying gold to build reserves may be strategically sound. Buying gold through a structure that exposes the central bank to enormous losses with a negative impact on the environment is another matter.
Having gone through the data and analysis over the past week, something simply does not add up. That is why I support a full, independent forensic investigation of the DGPP from its inception. And if one were to conduct a lifestyle audit of some of the personalities associated with the programme and its oversight now, one might be tempted to say, “Hmmm!” That call is timely and valid.
I definitely support a probe. Its purpose should not be to produce a political scalp. It should be to establish, transaction by transaction, how the reported US$1.7 billion arose; how much represents genuine economic cost; how much is valuation-related; how much resulted from exchange-rate arrangements; how much arose from off-taker discounts and fees; and whether any of these costs could have been reduced through better procurement, pricing, foreign-exchange management, financing or risk management. But most fundamentally, how did the DGPP in 2025 generate such exponential losses on a like-for-like comparison with 2024?
The NPP’s demand for accountability over public money is legitimate. But turning the issue into a political witch hunt against an individual obscures the bigger question.
The real issue is whether Ghana can explain, transparently and independently, how a programme designed to build reserves came to generate such extraordinary losses, with losses escalating dramatically in 2025 even as the economy stabilised and the foreign-exchange market improved. More importantly, what must change to ensure that it does not happen again?
Makra hom.
Dominic K. A. deGraft Aidoo
A UK-based Chartered Accountant with over two decades of accounting experience
