Finance
The mechanics of the Goldbod – a vulpine to route to impoverish and rifle from the country’s
THE MECHANICS OF THE GOLDBOD – A VULPINE ROUTE TO IMPOVERISH AND RIFLE FROM THE COUNTRY’S POOL.
The bluff and subterfuge of the NDC Party, colonized by John Mahama have been spurred clandestinely with the most spectral and chilling enterprise christened ‘ GoldBod ‘.
This masquerade and racket enterprise is jolly technical, hence, one may need technical aegis before amassing the penetration of such baleful machination. As usual, i will activate the lens of my profundity in a pedagogic manner, in bringing such policy home to the populace using akin symmetry. In fact, there is no correlation between the ‘ Gold for Oil ‘ policy and this ‘ GoldBod ‘ tack _ thus, these two are heterogeneously intertwined.
The Gold for Oil enterprise has been in the system and exhibited by a shower of countries for a long stretches of time, such that, it was emerged in 1973, with germane to the oil jam, precipitated by an oil embargo, obtruded upon by OPEC members, predominantly, Saudi Arabia, on nations perceived as shouldering Israel in the Yom Kippur War (Birjandi, 2003) _ even though, this said policy has had a tweaked exertion of it recently.
In a contemporary context, Ghana phased in its variant of the Gold for Oil program to cocoon in the escalating prices of petroleum products and thus, operated it as a cyclical policy facilitating the exchange of gold for oil, offering a strategic approach to oil import transactions.
In all, the encyclopedic objective of that policy was to ossify fuel prices and prune dependency on foreign currencies for oil imports, cultivating economic structural integrity and self-sufficiency.
On the other hand, the proposed ‘ GoldBod ‘ blueprint is purported to formalize small – scale gold mining sector, unlock full economic potential of gold industry and espouse cedis’ stabilization. In the concrete, they have jobbed us for these presumptive ideological images.
This measure is hypothetically programmed to poach and mirror the vein of the GoldBod steam, adopted by Guyana.
Guyana is one of few resource – opulent enhancing countries that has opted not to track a large-scale, export-led extractives diagram. The Government of Guyana has, for more than three decades, rather accented creating the salient policy conditions for local gold miners to flourish.
This approach was agitated by the erstwhile president of Guyana, Forbes Burnham – during his presidential ages, he nationalized 80% of the economy in order to dispirit foreign and private investments in a bid to make Guyana a self-sufficient, nonaligned socialist republic and to preempt the country from the ‘ resource curse ‘ syndrome.
But efforts to track down common ground and sets of variables have corroborated precisely the obverse : that, the mechanism in which what is defined as a ‘resource curse’ conventionally manifests, depends on the policy context, geographical setting as well as geological attributes. It has become abundantly clear that, there is no single all-encompassing explanation for the resource curse.
There are three thematic layouts, which focus on the accommodation of the briskness, efficacy and prospect of internally – moderating gold extraction firms and thus ; maximizing skilled personnel, engendering healthy and competitive institution and eventually, instituting a dense regulatory bodies.
There have been an eclipse of Guyana’s self – processing gold firms nippily recently but in a frantic fashion due to the poverty of these benchmarks. Officials like Joseph Singh, a retired army chief of staff and now chairman of the Geology and Mines Commission has confessed that, the sector now presents regulatory agencies with major administrative and other pitfalls, as they tussle to enforce regulations, recruit ample trained jungle mines inspectors, qualified geologists and other personnel to keep pace, and generally, preserve order in a sector that, it is arduous to superintend, because most of its activities are encircled in the remote Amazonian rainforests.
Also, their saturable institution, which has been fraught with audacious loopholes, has hosted to practically 15,000 Brazilians, many of them illegal miners, been exiled by the military from the Venezuelan jungle in the 1990s and pushed southeast to Guyana where they have flumped, have invested astronomically and persist to providing radical regulatory headaches for authorities.
Along with the other quagmires, the mines commission and police intimated, they were coerced to cope with a massive smuggling ring to neighbouring Suriname and have posited, it has accounted them for up to half of the estimated 600,000-plus ounces of gold that small- and medium-scale miners harvest annually.
In this case, Ghana is of no anomaly as the Guyana, pertinent to the leverages over those cardinal jewels ; we don’t possess any brill institution to expedite that agenda with no bed of roses ; the regulatory bodies intended to concert are half – pie and due to the blatant excruciating imbroglio presently, the masses of the skilled personnel are hauling to the diaspora.
In the reportage of World Bank in 2009, they foregrounded that, our firms have less machinery and equipment per worker (US$1200) than those in most other countries in the region; less than one quarter of our manufacturing firms export; hence, our labour productivity (US$1000) is roaringly low, approximately one sixth that of China, Kenya and Swaziland.
More materially, since the inception of the GoldBod by the Guyana, their economic status has been crippled with irreparable waterloo and as of now, they are vibrating in the web of boracic state. For emphasis sake, in 2016, a Forensic Audit into the GoldBod divulged that, bum supervision and unscrupulous golds trading amounted in erosion of over $10 billion for the span of 2012 to 2014.
Moreover, per the explorations by Ram and McRae Chartered Accountants Professional Service Firm ; the GoldBod chronicled a gross deprivation of $281.4 million in 2012, $9,716.6 million in 2013 and $79.6 million in 2014.
Also, in May, 2015, the GoldBod was in arrears to the Ministry of Finance $8,731.6 million for advances embraced in September 2012. At the same interval, the remnant on the GoldBod’s current account with the Bank of Guyana was an overdraft of $8,820 million making an aggregate of $17,552 million.
Again, it isn’t rosy that, the GoldBod in the futuristic events, discharges its obligations to the Ministry of Finance or liquidates its various overdrafts with the Bank of Guyana.
There have been a mountainous issues of gamesmanship pointed to the arithmetic’s of the pricing of the gold and as well, there has been poverty of lucency with the purchase price at the real time on the international market and as a result, it has been anchored that, for the past 44 years, no mileages have been accumulated from the mandatory disposals of golds to the government.
Therefore, the GoldBod policy, being cultivated by the NDC Party will entirely serve as a funnel for them to nick, exacerbate and freeze the cast of our financial fluidity in the pursuance of their solipsism and cupidity !
Source: Prof. Dinkum.
(The Buzzing Rapine Of Erudition)
E – mail : dinkumchoice@gmail.com
