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Cabinet has approved a comprehensive review of the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703).
The bill to amend the law has been forwarded to Parliament for passage, as the government moves to tighten regulation of the country's mineral resources and reposition the sector for national development.
Speaking at the Government Accountability Series at the Presidency in Accra yesterday, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, presented an account of the ministry's performance for the first half of the year.
The presentation covered the mining, forestry and lands sub-sectors.
Mr Buah said Act 703, which had been in force for two decades, had been reviewed following stakeholder consultations and endorsement by Cabinet for transmission to Parliament.
He stated that the revised bill introduced district mining committees as the entry point for licensing, created a new medium-scale mining category, and abolished the reconnaissance licence in favour of a single prospecting licence capped at five years.
Mining leases will now be fixed at a maximum of 20 years, and every lease will carry a mandatory community development agreement.
“The revised Bill provides an updated, coherent and forward-looking legal regime to ensure that mining contributes immensely to national development,” he said.
Mr Buah added that Cabinet had also approved a revised Minerals and Mining Policy, first drawn up in 2014, to strengthen local content and domestic value addition in the sector, alongside the Minerals and Mining (Royalties) Regulations, 2025 (L.I. 2517), which introduced a sliding-scale royalty regime tied to commodity price cycles.
“This self-adjusting mechanism offers greater predictability to investors than a rigid fixed rate vulnerable to low-price cycles,” the Lands and Natural Resources Minister explained.
On enforcement, Mr Buah disclosed that the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat (NAIMOS) executed 200 operations across 53 districts in six endemic regions between January and June this year, recording a strike rate of 84.1 per cent.
He revealed that the operations led to the arrest of 207 suspects, including 46 foreign nationals, and the seizure and/or destruction of 78 excavators, 2,800 chanfangs and 1,244 makeshift mining structures.
“Our rivers are not for sale. Our forests are not expendable.
Our mineral wealth is a sacred national inheritance that we have a duty to protect. Let me be clear, the era of impunity is over,” the lands minister warned.
Turning to reclamation, Mr Buah reported that 1,535 acres of degraded land in the Ashanti Region had been restored, done in partnership with the private sector, with a further 1,500 acres targeted by the end of the year. “The government is separately reclaiming 960 acres on its own across the country,” he stated.
The lands minister added that the government had launched the Strategic Land Administration Reform Project (SLARP), a national programme to modernise and decentralise the country's land administration system through eight components, including digitisation of the Lands Commission, systematic titling and a national cadastre, boundary demarcation and strengthening of customary land secretariats.
The ministry has also revised the Public Land Application Form (Form 5), proposed a new premium framework to align state land values with market prices, and established a Public Land Protection Task Force to guard against encroachment.
“These reforms are intended to ensure that state land transactions are done in a more transparent, accountable and efficient manner,” Mr Buah said.
He added that the Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands (OASL) had mobilised GH¢265.61 million so far, about 75.48 per cent of its annual target of GH¢351.88 million, and opened four new district offices during the period under review.
Providing updates on achievements in forestry, Mr Buah said about 31 million seedlings were planted in 2025 under the Tree for Life Restoration Initiative, restoring roughly 23,600 hectares of degraded land, with a fresh 30 million seedling target running from June, this year.
He announced that Cabinet, on June 24, this year, revoked the Executive Instrument that had altered the status of the Achimota Forest, restoring it fully as a Forest Reserve.
The lands minister added that the country had issued 411 Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) licences so far in 2026.
He assured the citizenry of the sector’s continuous efforts in restoring Ghana’s lands, forests and water bodies against illegal mining, and appealed for national unity in defending the country's natural resources.
