Ghana has created an anti-galamsey enforcement body roughly once every few years for the last decade. NAIMOS is the current one. Here is what it does, what it cannot do, and the single figure that would settle whether it is working.
NAIMOS stands for the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat. It is the coordinating body responsible for enforcement action against galamsey — illegal, unlicensed small-scale gold mining.
In practice its work looks like this:
Note the last one. NAIMOS makes arrests. It does not prosecute, sentence or imprison. Once someone is handed over, the outcome depends on a separate chain the secretariat does not control — and that is where the story usually goes quiet.
Ghana's enforcement history against galamsey runs through a series of named operations and bodies, of which Operation Vanguard — launched in 2017 with heavy military involvement — is the best known.
| Model | Character | Recurring criticism |
|---|---|---|
| Military-led operation | Soldiers deployed to mining districts | Allegations of abuses; operators returning once troops withdrew |
| Inter-ministerial committee | Policy coordination across agencies | Slow; distant from the sites |
| Standing secretariat (NAIMOS) | Permanent body, continuous operations | Arrest numbers announced; outcomes not published |
The structural shift is from campaign to permanent function. That is a genuine improvement on paper, because campaigns end and rivers do not. Whether it changes outcomes is a different question.
A permanent body solves the problem of enforcement stopping. It does not solve the problem of enforcement not finishing.
Every enforcement announcement in Ghana follows the same shape: X suspects arrested, Y excavators seized, at Z location. Those are the numbers that get published.
The number that does not get published is convictions.
We have not been able to locate a consolidated public register answering any of the three.
Without conviction data, an arrest figure measures activity, not effectiveness. A body could raid the same site every quarter, arrest the same operators, and report rising numbers as evidence of success.
Enforcement bodies hand over to the Attorney-General's department and the courts. A raid that produces no prosecution is not NAIMOS failing on its own terms — but it is still a failure, and nobody currently owns it.
Diggers are at the pit. Financiers are not. Enforcement that only reaches people physically present at a site cannot reach the people funding it. See who actually profits.
Mining sites sit in constituencies. Every Ghanaian government has faced accusations of shielding operators aligned with it, and every one has denied them. The accusation surviving changes of government is itself a data point.
Where galamsey is the highest-paying work available, removing it without replacing it displaces the activity rather than ending it. That is a policy problem, not an enforcement one — but enforcement gets blamed for it.
We record every announced arrest with date, number and location — then follow up at 30, 90 and 180 days. An arrest with no recorded outcome is an announcement, not enforcement.
NAIMOS's exact statutory basis, budget and reporting line are not set out in a single public document we have been able to obtain. We describe here what it does in practice, from reported operations. If an establishing instrument or annual report exists, we will publish it and update this page — [email protected]
We are tracking what happens to them. That follow-up lands in the weekly briefing.
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