The pillars were never forgotten gold

Beneath Tarkwa lies a question Ghana must answer before the ground answers it for us

When I was a boy, my late father, an underground miner who spent much of his working life in the tunnels beneath Tarkwa would sometimes explain to me the strange, patient discipline of his trade. Miners, he said, did not take every ounce of gold they found. Deep in the darkness, engineers deliberately left standing columns of untouched ore, holding up the roof of the earth like the pillars of a great cathedral. “The pillars are there to hold the ground,” he told me. “They are not forgotten gold.”

I have carried those words for decades. Today they return to me with an urgency I did not expect, because I fear that the very pillars my father’s generation left standing may now be quietly disappearing and with them, perhaps, the stability of the ground on which a town of more than two hundred thousand people lives, works, worships, and sleeps.

This article examines the rapid expansion of small-scale underground mining beneath Tarkwa, one of Ghana’s oldest gold-mining towns, and warns that the removal of historic support pillars may be compromising the stability of the ground on which more than 218,000 people now live. Let me be clear from the outset, this is not an argument against small-scale mining. It is a plea for us to look, honestly and scientifically, at what is happening beneath our feet while there is still time to act.

A Town Built on Gold, and on Trust in the Ground

For more than 140 years, Tarkwa has stood among Africa’s most celebrated gold-mining towns. Since commercial mining began under British colonial administration in the late nineteenth century, the town has become almost synonymous with Ghana’s mining heritage, a place of world-class deposits, engineering excellence, and hard-won prosperity. It is home to internationally recognised mining companies and to the University of Mines and Technology, which trains many of the very engineers the country now relies upon. The district has yielded millions of ounces of gold and remains one of Ghana’s largest contributors to national output, export earnings, employment, and technical education.

But Tarkwa is no longer only a mine. According to the 2021 Population and Housing Census, the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality is now home to 218,664 people, one of the largest mining municipalities in the country. Above the old workings sit schools and hospitals, homes and highways, markets and government offices, water lines and power lines, billions of dollars of public and private infrastructure. To protect that investment, we must protect the geology beneath it. The two cannot be separated.

What Our Fathers Understood About the Dark

Long before today’s open pits reshaped the landscape, Tarkwa’s gold was won underground. Historic operations, the Amalgamated Banket areas, the State Gold Mining Corporation workings, the Bompieso and Aboso mines, and several private ventures, carved hundreds of kilometres of tunnels linked by vertical shafts and horizontal drives. Everywhere they worked, professional mining engineers left support pillars behind. These were never regarded as wasted ore. They were preserved, deliberately and at real cost, to hold up the roof, to prevent ground movement, to absorb and redistribute stress, and to keep the excavations and everything above them, stable for generations to come.

That principle is not folklore. It remains one of the foundations of underground rock mechanics taught in mining schools around the world, including the one on Tarkwa’s own doorstep. My father did not have the vocabulary of stress redistribution and roof strata, but he understood the truth of it in his bones. The pillars hold the ground. Remove them carelessly, and the ground eventually remembers.

A New and Rapidly Growing Reality

Over the past decade, small-scale underground mining has expanded across the Tarkwa area at remarkable speed. Operations are now reported at Tarsco Top, Baako Akohu and Dargatti at Tamso Top, along the Teberebie Road, at Akoon Top, near Bogoso Junction and Brahabebome, and strikingly, close to the University of Mines and Technology Basic School. Industry observers estimate that more than ten underground operations exist within the municipality. Some hold valid licences; concerns have been raised that others may be operating outside the appropriate regulatory framework.

The scale is no longer modest. Local stakeholders suggest that more than two thousand miners descend underground every single day, drilling, blasting, loading, and hauling ore with equipment once associated only with large mines, underground locomotives, ore wagons, pneumatic drills, mechanical shovels, and rail haulage systems. Whatever else one calls this, it is a major economic sector, and it deserves oversight to match.

A further shift is worth naming plainly. Where foreign investors, and Chinese companies in particular, once concentrated on alluvial gold, attention has increasingly turned to hard-rock underground concessions, especially those containing historical shafts and old workings. Many partner with local concession holders to recover remnant gold from the mines of the past and to develop new ground. Foreign capital is not the enemy here. But when investment gravitates towards already-explored ground riddled with historic voids, the case for rigorous engineering oversight becomes stronger, not weaker.

Are the Pillars Being Taken?

This is the question that keeps returning to me, and I am not alone. Experienced underground miners in Tarkwa speak, quietly and repeatedly, of the removal of historical support pillars, the same pillars my father warned should never be touched. If these columns are being systematically extracted without comprehensive geotechnical assessment, then the stability of the old workings is being gambled away one blast at a time.

I do not claim to know how widespread this is. Nobody honestly can, without investigation. And that is precisely the point. Whether pillars are being stripped across Tarkwa is a matter for science to settle, not rumour, which is exactly why an independent geotechnical assessment is now urgently needed. We should not have to wait for the ground to give us the answer.

The Warning Signs Are Already Here

Residents in communities such as Teberebie Junction, Tamso Compound, Tamso Green Compound, and Efuanta increasingly complain of excessive ground vibration, repeated blasting, noise and dust, and cracks appearing in their walls. Blasting is not unusual in mining; but blasting close to homes demands strict monitoring, vibration control, and firm regulatory oversight,  not resignation.

The land itself is behaving differently, too. Tarkwa was never widely known for urban flooding, yet residents now report water rising around Efuanta and the Longe Hotel area, near Tarkwa Senior High School, at the Teberebie Barrier, and across other low-lying communities. Many attribute this to blocked waterways, mine waste deposition, and poor drainage around mining activity. Urbanisation and shifting rainfall play their part as well, but sound environmental management is not optional when so many lives sit in the path of the water.

Then there is the matter of access. Perhaps the most troubling concern raised by stakeholders is that regulators reportedly struggle to reach some underground operations at all — access restricted, workings far below the surface, conditions too hazardous for routine inspection, and monitoring resources stretched thin. If this is true, it is intolerable. A mining regulation is only as strong as a regulator’s ability to walk in, unannounced, and see for themselves.

What History Has Already Taught the World

We do not need to imagine the consequences of ignoring these warnings; the record is written elsewhere in blood. In 1960, at the Coalbrook mine in South Africa, underground pillars failed and the ground came down, killing more than four hundred miners in one of the continent’s worst disasters, a catastrophe that reshaped pillar design and mine planning for a generation. In 2007, the collapse at Crandall Canyon in Utah trapped and killed miners amid grave questions about pillar recovery under difficult geology. In 2006, a rockburst at Beaconsfield in Australia trapped men nearly a kilometre underground and reminded the industry, yet again, how quickly stable rock can turn violent without rigorous monitoring.

These tragedies struck rich and poor countries alike. They share one lesson: underground failure is not a matter of national wealth but of whether geological risk is respected or ignored. Ghana still has the chance to learn from them before, rather than after, our own name is added to the list.

The Market Stores That Fell

On 15 September 2025, two stores at the Tarkwa Women’s Market reportedly collapsed following blasting linked to an abandoned underground belt. Mercifully, no larger tragedy followed. But community members say this was no isolated event, that other ground movements and near misses have occurred without ever being formally recorded or reported. In mining, as in aviation, every near miss is a warning delivered without a bill. The only unforgivable response is to ignore it until the invoice arrives in full.

Beyond Prophecy: Let Evidence Lead

Recently, public conversation has been stirred by a prophecy warning that Tarkwa could collapse because its underground pillars have been removed. Let me say this carefully: there is no scientific evidence to validate such a prediction, and no community should ever make life-and-death decisions on the strength of prophecy alone. Fear is not a plan.

And yet, when popular anxiety happens to point at a genuine engineering question, the responsible answer is not to dismiss the fear, nor to surrender to it, but to replace it with knowledge. The proper response to a prophecy of collapse is not panic. It is an independent scientific investigation that tells us, plainly, what is and is not true beneath our feet.

What Must Now Be Done

Ghana is not short of expertise; it is short of coordinated action. The first and most urgent step is an independent underground stability assessment, carried out by a multidisciplinary team — geotechnical engineers, rock-mechanics specialists, the Geological Survey Authority, the Minerals Commission and its Inspectorate Division, our universities, and seasoned underground engineers, with a clear mandate to establish the true condition of the historical workings and to map the areas of greatest risk.

Alongside it, regulatory capacity must be strengthened so that inspectors can conduct unannounced visits, underground audits, geotechnical and blasting inspections, and explosives checks with the same rigour applied to large-scale mines. Explosives, in particular, demand discipline across their entire lifecycle,  transport, storage, handling, charging, blasting, and post-blast inspection, because poor handling is simply a disaster waiting for a date. Where an operation presents an imminent threat to workers or nearby residents, regulators must not hesitate to order it to stop until it is made safe.

Prevention must also be built into practice. Every underground operator should be formally trained in rock mechanics, pillar design, ground support, geotechnical monitoring, and safe extraction sequencing, because knowledge remains the cheapest and strongest barrier against catastrophe. Where it is technically feasible, especially in stope mining, the Minerals Commission should consider mandating cemented paste backfill, a proven method of filling mined-out voids to reduce the risk of collapse. And operators should be moved steadily towards modern monitoring: ground-movement and seismic sensors, laser scanning, drone-assisted mapping, digital mine plans, and real-time geotechnical surveillance. The technology exists. What is missing is the will to require it.

A Shared Responsibility

None of this is to deny what small-scale mining has given. It has created thousands of jobs, sustained countless households, lifted gold production, and stirred local enterprise. Those achievements are real and they deserve recognition. Foreign investment, too, remains vital and the right response is not to chase it away but to build a transparent, efficient framework that rewards legal concessions, responsible exploration, and modern safety and environmental standards.

But we must hold two truths at once. No quantity of gold can restore a lost life, rebuild a collapsed community, or reverse irreversible environmental harm. Economic development and public safety are not rivals competing for our loyalty; they are partners, and Tarkwa deserves both.

The Question Before Us

Tarkwa remains one of Ghana’s most important and, historically, one of its safest mining towns. I write not to spread alarm nor to undermine honest livelihoods, but to ask for vigilance, evidence, and the courage to act before we are forced to. The town’s heritage was built over generations by engineers who understood that some gold must be left in the ground so that everything above it can stand. Preserving that legacy means holding today’s operations to the same standard our fathers kept in the dark.

So the question is simple, and it belongs to all of us: will Ghana investigate the risks beneath Tarkwa while there is still time, or only after a preventable disaster forces our hand? History is generous to societies that invest in prevention. It is merciless to those that wait.

Tarkwa has given immeasurably to this nation through its gold. It now asks only for the same commitment in return, so that the generations to come inherit not merely the wealth beneath the town, but the safety, resilience, and confidence of the community that lives above it. My father’s pillars held up the ground for those who came after him. The least we owe him, and them, is to make sure we have not been quietly pulling those pillars down.

By Emmanuel Kwame Attiah  |  A concerned native of Tarkwa

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and does not reflect the views of the organization he works for. Email Address: [email protected]