Ghana risks wasting its coming lithium wealth as it did with gold, a transparency expert warned, unless it fixes how mining money is spent and why supply contracts leak abroad.
Dr. Steve Manteaw, a co chair of the Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), spoke at a media and civil society workshop on corruption risks in Ghana’s lithium sector, organised by the Natural Resource Governance Institute. With Ghana preparing to mine lithium at Ewoyaa, he said the gold sector’s record should serve as a warning.
Successive GHEITI reports, he said, show royalties meant for local development being spent on recurrent costs that leave little behind. In the Wassa area, he added, community royalty shares went towards funeral donations, while assemblies elsewhere put the money into canopies and event logistics ahead of elections and presidential visits.
Sanitation swallows much of the rest, he argued, even though assemblies are meant to fund it from property rates. He called the pattern an abuse and pressed for binding rules that would steer royalties into lasting projects rather than day to day spending.
His sharper point concerned procurement, which he called the largest share of mining’s value, about a third of a company’s spending and far bigger than taxes. Ghana lists 56 categories of goods and services miners should buy locally, he said, yet the policy is hollow in practice. “When Ghanaians get the contract, they go to China,” he said, importing the goods and pocketing the margin instead of building local industry.
The result, he said, is a mining sector barely connected to the rest of the economy. Lithium would change nothing, he warned, if Ghana carried the same habits into Ewoyaa, and success should be judged by the jobs, businesses and infrastructure mining leaves behind, not by export earnings alone.
He drew a contrast with what mining firms spend themselves, noting that Gold Fields built the road from Damang to Tarkwa after paying its taxes, while the public share of benefits showed less to point to. Manteaw urged journalists and civil society groups to probe how resource revenues are used, rather than stopping at contracts and royalty figures. He wanted to open a newspaper one day, he said, and read about why Ghana has not built a Johannesburg of its own.
