The first gold mine that operated in Tontokrom was Resolute Amansie, an Anglo-Saxon company by way of Australia. When the youth revolted against it, a second Anglo-Saxon multinational company, Keegan Resources, promised better economic relations with Tontokrom. The youth realized after a few years that they had been hoodwinked by the state again, and they launched another revolt. Another Anglo-Saxon company called Asanko Gold Mines has since operated in Tontokrom. Still the summary and complete economic marginalization of Tontokrom and its sister towns has continued.
The young men in Tontokrom and surrounding towns have taken matters into their own hands to restore economic parity. However, the equality they fight for in having access to their own lands to mine the gold in it is now threatened by the state apparatus for making violence—the Ghana military and the state police forces.
No matter, a group of economically disenfranchised young men successfully led a revolt against state seizure of natural resources in Tontokrom on August 6, 2025. These men, clearly, have been prevented by the Ghana government from mining the gold in their ancestral lands for decades. These men are defying the decades long, violent, government seizure of their lands, which prevents the rise of a local gold mining economy, and which hands over the rights to mine gold solely to private multinational corporations that are owned by Europeans.
Some of the profits that accrue to these Anglo-Saxon owned companies are used to fund the state-owned violence-making institutions. The monies fund the weapons and ammunition, state soldiers and state police forces that are used to violently crack-down on meaningful revolt. The unemployed youth in places like Tontokrom are economically disenfranchised as a result, forced to work menial jobs at these mining sites, while the profits from their natural resources accrue to Anglo-Saxon-owned companies.
The often-acclaimed Ghana state and private business partnership is actually a neocolonial system, which in yesteryear enforced the complete ownership of Ghana’s resources by Britain, but which now enforces the full colonization of Ghana’s resources by European-owned private, business multinationals. Either way the proceeds from Ghana’s resources flow to the colonial regimes in the west while these regimes fund and support the state democracy in Ghana that enables this economic violence.
Very well articulated senior.
The young men today are rising up for representation. No Representation No Mining. There are way too many young unemployed men in Ghana. The shame that they need to make themselves more useful “as a Man” no longer works for them in the way that that meme was used to psychological de-tool many of us from fighting what has been, clearly, a looting of our resources through neocolonial democratic methods in Ghana. Our government in Accra does not represent us. They are non-violent tools that the western empire continues to use to defraud us of our resources. More vim to the young men of Tontokrom. More vim to all young men everywhere who need to rise up against the violence of their economic disenfranchisement.
“They are non-violent tools that the western empire continues to use to defraud us of our resources.”