The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, Ing. Kenneth Ashigbey, has called for a clear separation between diplomatic tensions arising from xenophobic attacks in South Africa and Ghana’s commercial decisions regarding Gold Fields’ Tarkwa mining lease.
His call comes amid growing public debate over whether the government should decline the renewal of the South African company’s lease following xenophobic attacks in that country targeting foreign nationals, including Ghanaians.
Some groups are urging the government to use the lease renewal process as a form of retaliation against South Africa. The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) Ghana, on the other hand, has argued for a broader resource nationalism agenda in Ghana’s extractive sector.
However, Ing. Ashigbey insists that such diplomatic and economic issues must not be conflated.
Speaking on Citi Prime News, he argued that while Ghana and other African countries must strongly condemn xenophobia and pursue redress through continental platforms such as the African Union, such actions should not spill over into commercial agreements governed by law and contractual obligations.
He stressed that Gold Fields’ lease arrangements should be assessed on their own merits, separate from geopolitical or diplomatic tensions.
“It is so shameful and regrettable that a country that Ghana and other countries have supported during the period of Apartheid would come to this but then I think we need to separate that completely from other commercial relationships that we have.”
“I will say that we should separate the xenophobic attacks from the commercial businesses so far as Gold Fields is concerned. Gold Fields as a corporate body has met materially the terms of their lease. They have not been involved in any of these attacks so I don’t see why we should be using that to deal with this issue,” he said.
His comments add to the ongoing national debate over how Ghana should respond to xenophobic violence in South Africa without undermining investment stability and contractual governance in the mining sector.
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