Continuing with The Looting Machine Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth
By Tom Burgis...

..Life for the fauna around the hamlet of Kwamebourkrom in central Ghana got a little easier in late 2009. A pair of hunting dogs, Skimpy and Don’t Forget, which had spent their lives catching the bushmeat that supplemented their owner’s diet of fish and staple crops, barked their last after their master threw them a couple of fish from the day’s catch. Now the antelope, crested porcupines, and plump grass cutters that inhabit the tall grasses had two fewer predators to fear. Only later did Kofi Gyakah come to believe that Skimpy and Don’t Forget had been poisoned.

Beyond the pond where Gyakah cast his nets each day and above the tousled shrubs, the red arm of a crane rose against the sky. Usually the hamlet’s thirty residents heard the boom of explosive blasts each day at around noon. At night the sound of machines crushing rocks kept them awake.

Newmont, the biggest American gold mining company, had completed the first phase of the $700 million Ahafo mine three years earlier, with the support of the International Finance Corporation, the arm of the World Bank that lends money to private-sector projects. Three years before the IFC made its loan to Newmont’s new mine in Ghana, the World Bank had conducted an internal review of its programs in Ghanaian mining. The Bank and the IFC had been trying to revive Ghana’s ailing mining sector since the early 1980s. The Bank’s programs aimed to rehabilitate state owned mines, attract private investment, and assist small-scale miners. By and large, they failed. The internal review noted numerous shortcomings, including a “patently untrue” claim that mining in Ghana caused little environmental damage.1 The review, submitted to the Bank’s board, concluded that because of low taxes on foreign mining companies, modest employment of locals, and scant recompense for people living near the mines, “it is unclear what [the mining sector’s] true net benefits are to Ghana.”

Nonetheless, the IFC had gone ahead and furnished Newmont with $125 million of finance for the new mine at Ahafo. The company uprooted ninety-five hundred people, but Kofi Gyakah and the other residents of Kwamebourkrom stayed put in their mud-and-thatch cottages, growing crops, fishing, and hunting bushmeat as they always had. Soon the school where they sent their children closed down. The noise grew insufferable. Then came the cyanide.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/01/part-4-looting-machine-warlords.html