Revisionary Ghana & Africa: From Gold to Bread

By Dr. David Nana Ofori Jr.

No About the Book information at this time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669872429

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REVISIONARY

GHANA & AFRICA

FROM GOLD TO BREAD

Dr. David Nana Ofori, Jr.

Copyright © 2023 by Dr. David Nana Ofori, Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/24/2023

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Contents

Foreword

Mineral Overview

Ghana: From Gold to Bread - Conclusion

References

Foreword

With a background in physics (crystallography), geophysics (mineral and petroleum exploration), seismology, and disaster management, I can relate to every concern raised in this thrilling analysis of the resources of nations around the world from Russia, Australia, Afghanistan, Brazil, China to the Pacific Islands, North and South America, through the Caribbean, and Africa. While in much of the rest of the world, there is some value addition to mineral exploitation, in the developing world, and Africa in particular, the raw minerals are simply shipped away with very minimal returns to the resource owners who then have to purchase the finished products of these minerals at prices that are often several hundred times the price that the mining companies pay for the raw materials.

Additionally, minerals like bauxite have associated by-products—the silicates: gibbsite, boehmite, and diaspore, the two oxides of iron: goethite and hematite; and the clay mineral kaolinite, as well as small amounts of anatase and ilmenite. These could potentially provide employment avenues and taxes for the African bauxite exporting countries if the bauxite were to be processed in the areas where they are mined.

Ghana, for instance, has been ninth in the world and is the largest producer of gold in Africa, overtaking South Africa since 2019. The country has been mining gold for more than five centuries and, yet, still does the barest minimum in terms of processing the mineral. Sadly, much of the current production is done through the environmentally very destructive open cast mining process, which has been banned for decades in the countries from which the miners of the new gold rush troop to Ghana.

Historically, there have been several instances of foreigners siphoning off Africa’s riches. Today, there is a new rush for Africa’s mineral resources, this time, facilitated by unaccountable African officials and corporations, and Ghana has not been an exception to this sad story. The result is the persistence of grinding poverty in areas that are blessed with resources, many of which have been detailed by Dr. Ofori in this book.

Dr. David Ofori has spent over two decades in pioneering work in healthcare, including pediatrics, geriatric, cardiac, sports medicine and rehabilitation, and mobile health management. He designed to uplift the marginalized, deprived, and impoverished communities in the United States of America, winning several awards and acknowledgments in the process.

It is his professional acquaintance with deprivation that moved David into taking post-graduate doctoral studies to become an occupational/industrial health and safety engineer. Furthermore, Dr. Ofori pursued his interests in researching mineral resources around the world and the effects they could potentially have on the disadvantaged in the developing countries of the world and Africa with special emphasis on his own native Ghana.

The healthcare provider, a presbyter and a former moderator of the Presbytery of New York City that he is, his very extensive research into the mineral occurrence, concentration, exploitation, and processing—the diagnosis, so to speak—is followed by prescriptions of solutions (treatments) of the problems. And as often happens in medicine, some of the prescribed treatments are not pleasant. However, a surgeon must, by necessity, go through incisions and cutting to remove deceased body parts in order to make the patient better.

With particular reference to Ghana, this has been a very brave exercise by Dr. Ofori, as it goes against the normal practice, knowing that much of what he has to say goes against traditional wisdom, especially since individuals with familial links may be affected because of current vocations and the positions they hold in higher echelons of society.

However, the prescribed treatments, though painful, are not only designed to save Ghana by way of job creation, foreign income generation, and taxes but will also empower numerous countries on the African continent and beyond, taking them to the commanding heights of their mineral industries, and make them benefit their wider societies and impoverished communities. The establishment of primary and, in some cases, secondary processing plants in deprived communities will help provide jobs in those communities, stem the unbridled urbanization, and minimize the proliferation of social vices in those potentially rich but deprived communities.

Ghana has huge deposits of gold, diamond, manganese, and bauxite, as well as untapped quantities of iron ore, limestone, brown clay, kaolin, mica, feldspar, silica sand, quartz, salt, lithium, etc. Ilmenite, magnetite, rutile, and other rare earth minerals.

Like many African countries, Ghana’s Fourth Republican Constitution invests so much power in the executive, thus making it easy for the president to literally override Parliament in the appointment of oversight institutions, particularly with respect to the mineral resources of the country. Strong, democratic, and independent institutions are required to revamp the regulatory institutions of the country to make it derive more benefits for its citizens and create employment for the teeming unemployed youth, many of whom have, in desperation, taken to traveling outside the country through unorthodox, often dangerous, routes to what many wrongly believe to be greener pastures.

It is these challenges that Dr. Ofori confronts headlong in this very radical and highly recommended exposition of the ills of the mineral industry in Africa and Ghana in particular, while prescribing solutions with the eye of a clinician.

Dr. A Ofori Quaah

Author of My Footprints in Ghana’s Black Gold

Mineral Overview

What Is Mineral?

Minerals are crystalline solids in the natural state that can then be mixed into one or more components (i.e., chemical compounds and elements). Gold, silver, and carbon contain natural mineral elements by themselves. These are also known as indigenous components. Usual cuisine salts are indeed a chemical substance called rock salt, a sodium and chlorine ion mineral. Atoms, ions, and molecules forming a mineral will be in the domain smoothly according to well-defined geometric patterns called a crystal lattice. The sequence and pattern of combining particles in nature determine how a mineral will laminate or exfoliate. Lamination is the phenomenon that certain materials must split into under their regular lattice (geometrical lattice). It also specifies the crystal structure and composition to the shade of crystal such as topaz gold, ruby red, and amethyst quartz violet. The strength, that is, their scratching resistance, is yet another feature of minerals. Hardness is ranked as per the Mohs hardness scale¹ by numeric quantities (from 1 to 10). At the start of the scale, very soft minerals, including talc, chalk, and calcite can be scrapped with a nail, and at the other end, the scale indicates diamond, which is really the well-known hardest mineral.

Mineral Criteria as per International Mineralogical Association

The International Mineralogical Association (IMA) established specific features for the material to be regarded as minerals (Nickel, 1995).

➢It essentially should be a natural product that is created in the universe and in other interplanetary entities through natural formations. This includes compounds specifically and exclusively produced from human (anthropogenic) or living (biogenic) practices, such as tungsten carbide, urinary calculi, cell, and tissue oxalate crystals and beads. Substances with such sources can, therefore, apply if they are affected by natural formations as in the case of evenkite, derived from plant material, or taranakite, from bat guano, or alpersite, from mine tailings. And in presently inaccessible natural settings like the heart of the Earth or other worlds, hypothesized contaminants are often removed (Nickel, 1995).

➢Through its common occurrence, that must be a crystalline lattice. One big exception is indigenous mercury, which is still graded as an IMA mineral even though it is only less than −39 °C since it was found before the establishment of the existing classification. Water and carbon dioxide, since they are sometimes included in other minerals, are not regarded as minerals; however, water as ice is regarded as minerals (Hazen, 2012).

➢The atomic arrangements must be well established in the crystalline orientation. This function includes many physical thermal characteristics, for example, crystal-form, hardness, and cleavage. It excludes ozocerite, limonite, and granite content, as well as several other porous (non-crystalline) (Dyar, 2008).

➢The molecular structure must be very well described. Some crystalline materials can be called geological products, nevertheless, with a single strategy but a dynamic formulation. Nanocomposites, such as mackinawite, (Fe, Ni)9 S8, which are mostly ferrous sulfides substituted by nickel atoms, have become common examples. Other samples contain layered crystals that only vary in the usual vacancy and replacement structure by stacking the factor layer of crystals. On the other side, a range of compounds may be broken into many minerals randomly. Typical examples of this are the olive category (Mg, Fe)2 SiO4), whose end components are rich in magnesium and iron (forsterite and fayalite) (Wolthers, 2005).

Such guidelines are quite ambiguous in their depth. There were some current initiatives for the classification of amorphous materials as minerals, for example, but the IMA does not approve. The IMA is timid about accepting a minimal of crystallite-size minerals, which only exist naturally throughout the format of nanomaterial with some hundred atoms around. Some researchers necessitate a solid at ambient temperature (25°C) to be stable or metastable. The IMA only needs the material to be stable enough to even be able to ascertain its structural features. Meridianites, for example, (a natural magnesium sulfate hydrate) have been recently recognized as minerals, but they are only formed and sustainable beneath 2°C (Dyar, 2008).

Ghana’s Mineral Industrial Sector

In Ghana, the extraction of minerals goes back to colonial times, and that is why Ghana was called the Gold Coast before independence. Most mining in Ghana was state-owned, but Ghana has drawn foreign investment and moved toward private enterprise and national dislocation after the PNDC administration launched an economic recovery program in 1983. The privilege to extract the minerals from the land has been given to private entities. However, Ghana has the right to a 10 percent carried interest for which it makes no monetary contribution. The state can, through a partnership with the contractor, acquire further paid interest in any mining operation