Ghana’s large gold revenues could obscure a more fundamental constraint on its industrialisation: the country does not have enough of some of the minerals it would need as industrial activity expands, Bright Simons said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy (SYPALA) 2026 in Accra, the Honorary Vice-President of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education said Africa’s mineral wealth is often overstated because attention tends to focus on the minerals in which individual countries are strong.
Ghana is a major gold producer and currently earns almost $20 billion from the metal, according to Mr Simons. But gold, he argued, is not necessarily the mineral that matters most for building an industrial economy.
“If we were to consume copper at the rate that the world average consumption is, we will need 5.5 million tons of copper,” he said.
He also estimated that Ghana would require about 14 times more steel than it currently produces if it consumed the metal at the global average rate.
That gap would become more significant if Ghana accelerated industrialisation, he said, because steel, copper and other industrial materials are fundamental to infrastructure and manufacturing.
The weakness is less apparent today because Ghana, like much of Africa, is not yet industrialising at a pace that generates large-scale demand for such minerals, Mr Simons said.
“We don’t notice it because we are not industrializing,” he said.
He said the debate over mineral wealth should therefore shift from how much of a particular mineral a country has to whether its mineral endowment supports the economic transformation it seeks.
For Ghana, the implication is that strong gold production should not be treated as evidence that the country is broadly well supplied with the minerals needed to build an industrial economy.
Mr Simons said policymakers should instead identify the minerals required for industrialisation, assess domestic reserves and production capacity, and build strategies around those supply gaps.
