After losing her 155-acre farmland in 2023, 97-year-old Maame Serwaa says the state and its partners have failed to honour the compensation she deserves. Her farm had crops, including palm and teak plantations.
“We have no means of feeding our families, paying our children’s school fees as well as paying our medical bills,” she told the Ghana News Agency while appealing to President John Dramani Mahama to step in.
Madam Serwaa is part of several farmers whose land was taken for Newmont’s Ahafo North gold mine. They are demanding that the Lands Commission pay compensation which they claimed accumulated for years, and rejected Newmont’s bid to have 21 members’ structures declared “speculative”.
The aggrieved group, known as the Concerned Farmers Association, speak for farmers in Terchire, Afrisipakrom, Susuanso and Adrobaa in the Tano North Municipality of the Ahafo Region. They raised their concerns during a news conference in Terchire on Monday, November 2.
A poultry farmer known only as Asibi said she has not received any compensation after her land was taken.
Newmont’s Ahafo North mine in the same municipality was unveiled by Vice-President Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang in October 2025.
Two land acquisitions, three years of waiting
Two Executive Instruments were used to acquire land for the project: E.I. 356 of September 29, 2023, and E.I. 273 of July 15, 2024.
Farmers who are seeking compensation under E.I. 356 say they have not received any payment since the state moved onto their land in December 2023 and destroyed their property.
“Their farmlands have been taken, their properties destroyed and their sources of income lost. Yet they are still waiting for compensation,” Chairman of the association, John Mensah, said.
Under E.I. 273, the Lands Commission’s Valuation Technical Committee signed off the sums on April 13, 2026, and the farmers’ legal team agreed to the terms on April 24, but money has not been released.
According to Mensah, 84 farmers are still owed land compensation.
Newmont’s ‘speculative’ Claim
The Lands Commission, in June 2026, told the farmers that Newmont had petitioned it against paying 21 members’ structures, calling them speculative.
According to the farmers, the petition relies on a cut-off date of 2017, set under the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703).
In 2022, Newmont told reporters the company had declared the area a mining zone in 2017 and posted notices, and that anything built after that date had no right to be there.
Newmont at the time said it was expected to demolish roughly 9,721 buildings it regarded as illegal, and was paying their owners a “relief support package”, for which it had GH¢45 million.
The farmers argue the cut-off no longer applies. The state, they say, abandoned negotiations under the mining law and compulsorily acquired the land under the Land Act, 2020 (Act 1036) instead.
“Under the Land Act, Act 1036, a property is described as speculative when improvements are made after the Government publishes its notice to acquire the land. It does not refer to an alleged mining cut-off date,” Mensah said.
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The association adds that the disputed structures were counted in a 2024 joint inspection supervised by a Ministerial Committee. The records were signed by the farmers, the Land Valuation Division and a Newmont representative.
“Newmont is the beneficiary of the acquisition. It is not the State,” Mensah said, insisting that the Commission must decide compensation on its own judgment.
Attempts by Joynews to get a response from Newmont on the farmers’ claims proved futile. There is also no record at the Lands Commission of the issues being raised by the farmers.
The company made GH¢12.822 billion in fiscal payments to the state in 2025.
