Chairman Wontumi is going to prison. The Accra High Court found the NPP's Ashanti Regional Chairman,
Bernard Antwi-Boasiako, guilty on all counts tied to illegal mining at Samreboi and handed him a 20-year
sentence - four years shy of the maximum the law allows.
Justice Audrey Kocuvie-Tay of the Criminal Court 4 Division delivered the verdict on Monday, July 20,
convicting Wontumi, his company Akonta Mining Limited, and co-accused Kwame Antwi (still at large) on
charges of assigning mineral rights without ministerial approval and facilitating unlicensed mining,
contrary to the Minerals and Mining Act. Six counts were spread across the three defendants; each count on
its own carried up to 25 years.
The last-ditch move that didn't work
Before getting to the verdict, the judge had to deal with one final obstacle. Lead defence counsel Samuel
Atta Akyea was out of the country, so his colleague Charles Boakye stood in to argue a motion filed on July
16 asking the court to pause judgment and send constitutional questions about the mining law to the Supreme
Court. Atta Akyea's argument was that key sections of the Minerals and Mining Act - 14(1), 59 and 99(2)(b) -
are too vague to support a conviction under Article 19(11) of the Constitution.
Justice Kocuvie-Tay wasn't persuaded. She ruled the application had no merit and proceeded straight to
judgment. Wontumi's own defence at trial - that the Samreboi arrangement with prosecution witness Henry Okum
was strictly land reclamation and coconut farming, not mining - didn't survive the court's scrutiny
either.
Within an hour of the sentence, commentator Ken Ashigbey said he wished the judge had gone all the way to
the 25-year maximum, arguing the punishment should match the scale of galamsey's damage to Ghana's land and
water bodies. On the other side, at least one lawyer has warned publicly that a lengthy sentence risks
costing ordinary workers on the concession their jobs - a reminder that galamsey convictions rarely touch
only the person in the dock.
Why this one matters more than the number
Twenty years is a headline figure, but the real story is what it signals. This is a sitting NPP regional chairman - someone who was actively positioning himself for a shot at NPP National Chairman - convicted under a government led by the NDC's John Mahama, whose administration made galamsey enforcement a signature promise. For Ghanaians who've watched big political names walk away from mining scandals for a decade, a conviction that actually sticks, on the actual judgment day it was scheduled for, is unusual enough to be its own story. It also lands at a specific moment: Wontumi is still fighting a separate GH₵30 million Exim Bank fraud case, where his lawyers have already opened plea talks with the Attorney-General's office, and he faces yet another mining case tied to the Tano Nimiri Forest Reserve. Three legal fronts, three different strategies - outright denial in Samreboi, negotiation in the Exim Bank matter. That split approach tells you his camp isn't betting on one outcome protecting him everywhere.
What nobody's said yet
The court hasn't addressed what happens to the constitutional questions Atta Akyea raised. Dismissing the motion for lacking merit isn't the same as the Supreme Court ruling those provisions are sound - and an appeal built on exactly that constitutional argument is now the obvious next move for the defence. Whether Wontumi's team pursues that appeal, or shifts fully toward negotiating the Exim Bank case instead, will tell Ghanaians more about how serious his legal exposure really is than today's sentence alone.