The Managing Director of the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), Dr. Abena Amoah has urged management of the nation to take possession of its pure assets, to be able to obtain the envisaged growth.
Speaking on the 2024 version of the Minerals Income Investment Fund Speaker Series on the University of Mines and Technology Tarkwa, she lamented that Ghanaians have grow to be mere caretakers of their pure assets.
“It is time for Ghana to have a right to its natural resources,” Dr Amoah stated.
The MIIF-UMaT Distinguished Speaker Series is a scholarly engagement of mining business gamers or what could also be known as a thought-leadership strategy to prescribing options for the numerous challenges bedeviling mining in Ghana.
Delivering the keynote handle, the Dr Abena Amoah was emphatic that there’s proof of plentiful wealth within the international locations which have possession of such assets.
“According to international buyers, Ghana has a superior infrastructure power, port, rails, street and we have now expert mining labour, so I ask, why accomplish that many Ghanaians really feel poor? Why do our mining communities complain they’ve barely benefited from the assets we dwell on?
Why accomplish that lots of our younger males really feel so hopeless and their solely means out is to danger their lives, they usually know they’re risking them, and all of ours by embarking on Illegal and harmful mining actions that pollute our lands and water our bodies?” she requested.
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The GSE MD additional queried, “I ask; why have we dug and shipped out our assets for lots of of years with out no worth addition? Why does the typical Ghanaian really feel up to now faraway from our most necessary financial sector?
Why is our nation so broke that we would have liked to safe an IMF bailout of a puny three billion {dollars} to be disbursed to us over three years, in comparison with the worth of assets we sit on?Why?”
She said that “From my own research, I firmly believe the answer is because we do not own these resources. We just sit on them. Others own them. We don’t own it because ownership brings influence and decision-making rights on value addition. Ownership is what is wealth not being a citizen of Ghana.”
Dr Amoah lamented that, “We see evidence of abundant wealth when we travel abroad to the countries that own our natural resources; the UK, Europe, North America, we see them, how developed their countries are. We see evidence of abundance of wealth in countries who own their own mineral resources. We see it in South Africa, China, Australia and the others. We see ownership of their resources and the journey to wealth creation.”
The theme for this yr’s MIIF- UMaT Distinguished Speaker Series was, “Mining as an asset class – the rubrics of using the stock market as a growth pole for wealth generation.”