GoldBod's GH¢5.44bn Surplus vs Bank of Ghana's Losses

GOLDBOD

GoldBod's audited 2025 Annual Report and Financial Statements prepared by the Auditor-General and published in April 2026 show total revenue of GH¢5.55 billion for the year, an operational surplus of GH¢909.7 million, and an overall surplus of GH¢5.44 billion. CEO Sammy Gyamfi has repeatedly pointed to these audited figures, noting they carried no adverse findings, as proof the institution is financially sound.

CEO Lawyer Sammy Gyemfi

The Chief Executive Officer Sammy Gyamfi Esq. has also stressed that this performance held up despite headwinds: international gold prices fell more than 23% from February 2026 levels, and GoldBod's own pricing incentive on its baseline purchasing programme was cut from roughly 14% to 6% during the year. Earlier unaudited estimates from GoldBod (before the April audit) had put the 2025 revenue at around GH¢960 million with expenditure under GH¢120 million those numbers were superseded once the full audited statement, which includes trading revenue beyond just fees, was published.

The controversy isn't really about whether GoldBod itself lost money it's about what happened at the Bank of Ghana (BoG), which financed and absorbed the risk of the underlying gold-purchase programme for most of 2025.

Independent analysis found that the programme generated a gross loss of roughly GH¢21.89 billion on the central bank's books, which was reduced to a net GH¢9.05 billion after a GH¢5 billion government cost-share intervention and GH¢7.9 billion in realised gains from gold bullion sales. Separately, the IMF's fifth review of Ghana's programme disclosed that losses from the artisanal and small-scale gold trading component had reached US$214 million (about GH¢2.43 billion) by the end of Q3 2025 alone, warning that the arrangement posed risks to the BoG's financial sustainability.

Read also: Fuel Prices Jump up again in Ghana

The structural reason for this split: for most of 2025, GoldBod operated as an intermediary rather than an independent trader. Its dedicated GH¢4.5 billion revolving seed capital only became available in December 2025, so through most of the year, GoldBod purchased gold using Bank of Ghana funds and simply earned an assay fee (0.258%) and service charge (0.5%) for doing so. That structure meant GoldBod collected steady fee revenue regardless of gold price swings, while the central bank absorbed the full currency risk, price risk, and market execution risk on the underlying trade.

A January 2026 University of Ghana technical report authored by economists Professor Festus Ebo Turkson, Professor Agyapomaa Gyeke-Dako, and Peter Junior Dotse took a different angle, arguing that GoldBod's macroeconomic benefits (reduced smuggling and non-debt foreign exchange inflows) far outweigh the BoG's reported trading losses. The researchers found that much of the reported BoG loss reflects accounting translation effects from buying gold at near-retail exchange rates to discourage smuggling while booking the resulting FX inflows at the lower interbank rate rather than genuine cash losses. They estimated the true economic cost of the programme at roughly 2.5% of the value of gold traded, well below the widely cited headline loss figures.

GoldBod's numbers became a live political flashpoint after the Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, alleged during the July 2026 Mid-Year Budget Review debate that the initiative was recording significant losses and had failed to deliver meaningful economic growth. Gyamfi fired back, calling the claims a "discredited cacophony of lies" and pointing again to the audited GH¢5.44 billion surplus figure as the factual record. This is the same broader tension that surfaced during the NPP's August 6 "Democracy Under Attack" protest, where GoldBod was explicitly named as an institution the party intends to scrutinise if it returns to power in 2028.