“The industry is not sustainable at $1,230 an ounce,” he said June 27. “We’re going to need at least $1,500 an ounce to sustain this industry in any reasonable form.”
Prices are already too low for Boahene in Ghana, who said he can’t afford to pay his workers $10 a day and rent an excavator for $750 a day. He said he’ll go back to installing satellite televisions if the price doesn’t recover.
The gold rush had a darker side for the town of Dunkwa. Resentments grew against Chinese immigrants who arrived to develop mines, using excavators and other heavy equipment few local people could afford. Miners dumped silt and chemicals into the river Pra, the region’s chief drinking source.
Dunkwa hasn’t benefited much visibly from its mineral wealth. On the unpaved, rutted road through town, a battered silver hatchback with a bumper sticker reading DESTINY inched past as a taxi, stuck in a six-foot-wide puddle, disgorged its shoeless passengers to walk through the muck.
Crime Spike
Thefts -- of mobile phones, motorbikes and even Caterpillar Inc. excavators -- are reported daily, said Love Mensah, crime officer of the Upper Denkyira East Municipal Assembly. The thieves use a master key to start the excavators and load them onto trucks, he said.
The two men shot recently were trying to loot homes and mine sites of Chinese nationals, Mensah said. Ghana’s government expelled dozens of Chinese miners this year, enforcing laws that restrict small-scale mining to citizens. Shutdowns of their mines compounded joblessness caused by gold’s falling price, said Lawrence Ansah-Brew, the area’s environmental health officer.
“The youth are just loitering about,” he said.
Nana Kofi, 22, quit school as a teenager, moved to Dunkwa and got jobs running excavators. Out of work for eight months, he said he’s down to $450 in savings.
“I know about 200 young men who are at home,” he said. “When we attack people with machetes, they should know we have to eat. I don’t mean I will do that, but it will happen.”