A Ghanaian court has sentenced businessman and senior opposition politician Bernard Antwi Boasiako, widely known as Chairman Wontumi, to 20 years in prison for violating national mining laws.
The Accra High Court on Monday convicted the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) Ashanti regional chairman and his company, Akonta Mining Limited, of assigning mineral rights without ministerial approval and facilitating unlicensed gold mining at Samreboi in western Ghana.
The court found that Boasiako permitted two individuals, Henry Okum and Michael Gyedu Ayisi, to mine gold on the company’s concession without approval from the minister of lands and natural resources. He was also fined 120,000 Ghanaian cedis (about $11,000), while Akonta Mining was fined 180,000 cedis.
Boasiako pleaded not guilty to all charges and insisted during the trial that one of the miners had been authorized only to rehabilitate degraded land by planting coconut trees. However, Justice Audrey Kocuvie-Tay rejected his defense, finding that Boasiako had knowingly permitted gold mining and was the company’s “true de facto holder of the mineral right.”
The opposition NPP has denounced the judgment as “political imprisonment” and said it would appeal both the conviction and sentence.
“There is no justification for the judgment since the judge obviously ignored clear evidence exonerating Wontumi,” NPP General Secretary Justin Frimpong Kodua told reporters. He described Boasiako as a “political prisoner” and accused the government of pursuing selective prosecutions to create “the appearance of success” in combating illegal mining.
Ghana is Africa’s leading gold producer, but illegal small-scale mining, locally called galamsey, has polluted significant portions of the country’s rivers with mercury and cyanide and damaged farmland and forest reserves.
The environmental damage has triggered repeated demonstrations. More than 50 demonstrators, including Ghanaian lawyer and activist Oliver Barker-Vormawor, were arrested during anti-galamsey protests in Accra in September 2024, when the NPP led the country. Barker-Vormawor spent about three weeks in custody before being granted bail. The charges were withdrawn after the National Democratic Congress party returned to power in January 2025.
Barker-Vormawor welcomed Boasiako’s conviction, describing the day as “important for the path to justice.”
“Imagine 3,000 more galamseyers serving 20-year sentences. That would show how serious we are,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that Ghanaians want the return of “justice, probity and accountability.”
Boasiako’s sentencing is the first involving a senior political figure since Ghana launched a nationwide crackdown on illegal mining nearly a decade ago. Chinese national Aisha Huang, nicknamed Ghana’s “Galamsey Queen,” was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for illegal mining in 2023.