Hunting for black sand has been damaging The Gambia’s coastal communities for decades. Now, the man leading the operation is an associate and a known supporter of the Gambian President Adama Barrow. According to the National Audit Office, the licence issued to the man’s firm failed the due process test.
The company at the heart of this is GACH, whose activities strip women— mainly gardeners and rice farmers— about 60% of their income, according to a 2024 study by environment watchdog NEA.
Despite this, GACH operates without necessary oversight from environment watchdogs, and the State that owns 60% of its net profit ‘blindly relies on the company for even records of shipment’. A request by The Republic for the mining contract, company’s account statements and export records— using the Access to Information law— remained ignored for 60 days on.
Behind this building in Tujereng is the site being mined by GACH Mining Company, a company specialising in extracting heavy mineral concentrates in The Gambia. The mining operations, however, damage not just the environment but also businesses. One such case is that of Lamin “Langkala” Sano, who operates a beach bar restaurant. Due to the destruction of the wildlife and the road leading to the beach, his business is almost at a standstill.
The mining sites are within two kilometres of the shoreline. The areas which used to be thick forests now stand barren, with no trees on sites being mined except for the few that dot the surrounding areas. On-site, GACH mounts a giant machine that— in its wake— creates large craters, sorting white and black sand rich in ilmenite, zircon, rutile, silica, and quartz. The indiscriminate digging leaves behind large streams which, according to local communities, have become infested with crocodiles. The communities’ observations were also confirmed by a European Union (EU)–funded study conducted by the Gambia’s environment watchdog whose job should have been holding GACH accountable— the National Environment Agency (NEA).
“The mine has had a greater impact on women than men. At the household level, the mine has cost between 50 and 70% of household income, representing up to D10,000 per month,” said the NEA in its study conducted in May 2024.
“The bird watchers, they do not come here anymore. This place used to be bushy. It was filled with wildlife that attracted tourists. It had so much life. But now, all the trees are gone. A lot of tourists used to come here and go into the forest. That is not possible anymore,” Lamin told The Republic.
The mining company demolished the toilet and the room he built for his customers. Although he is being compensated for this, Lamin says it makes no difference. “Even though they have replaced my toilet and will rebuild the room and have also gotten me stand-up showers, what is the use if tourists do not come here like they used to because they have already destroyed the environment?”
In the past, Lamin recalled, at least two fully loaded minivans with tourists would visit his bar daily during the tourist season. “Now you barely see anyone. This whole year, I have not seen them.”
The first site GACH Mining Company mined in Sanyang is called Banko. It completed work in this area in 2022, and the land is now dry and barren.
The mining in Banko displaced a lot of women gardeners. One such displaced gardener is Yadinho Jabang , whose garden is situated between the site mined by GACH and a site mined by GINKON. The garden, which had operated for decades, is now heavily flooded due to the mining activities.
GINKON is owned by two politicians who are members of The Gambia’s ruling party, NPP – Kebba Madi Bojang and Momodou Bojang. Momodou is the former councillor for Sanyang ward, and Kebba is the National Youth President of the party. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, Momodou was NPP’s candidate for Kombo South.
“The other side, mined by the company that was mining white sand, was already flooded. But it became worse when these Chinese (GACH) came and were mining the black sand. They supplied more water to the area. It is completely flooded,” Jabang explained.
“We are powerless. They cut down all the trees they found here. Those areas cannot be used for gardening anymore. It’s filled with water. A lot of women had to abandon their gardens. We have been making less money as a result, and this is our only source of livelihood,” she added.
Similarly, Amie Jabang, like many of the women who have gardens in Sansanding, the site currently mined by GACH in Sanyang, is the breadwinner of her family. However, her income has dropped significantly due to the impact of mining in the community, an experience similar to the findings in NEA’s 2024 study.
“This garden means everything to us. This is how we fund our children’s school fees and take care of our families. The mining has destroyed a lot of gardens. The big trucks are a nightmare. They have ruined all the roads leading to our gardens,” Amie Jabang told The Republic. “During the rainy season, this road is filled with stagnant water. You cannot even walk to access your garden. It becomes flooded. A lot of animals like snakes and crocodiles migrate from the sea to our gardens, destroying our rice fields.”
When contacted for comments, GACH said it was aware its mining had affected women gardeners, but said it “provided compensation equivalent and above their expected loss.”
“Our (mining) activity has been carried out in a responsible manner with every effort to mitigate damage to the environment,” said GACH.
However, activists and community members in Sanyang and Tujereng denied any knowledge of compensation to the women gardeners.
Contract awarded without due process
The Geology Department awards mining contracts in The Gambia. It is a unit of the Ministry of Energy, which, until 2017, was under the Office of the President.
Ex-president Yahya Jammeh awarded mining rights to his own company, Alhamdulillah Mining Company. President Adama Barrow’s government has, however, not acted too differently: it gave the contract to a man with deep ties to the president and his political party without any form of public tender.
In 2020, the National Audit Office queried that the contract should not have been single-sourced without the approval of the Gambia Public Procurement Authority (GPPA) to GACH, a company whose de facto owner— Abubakary Jawara— has deep ties to the presidency. However, GACH told The Republic that when it acquired the licence in October 2017, its CEO had no relationship with the president or his political party, which was formed in December 2019.
“Discussion with officials at the Geology Department revealed that Gach mining company has been issued a licence to begin mining black sand at the Kartong, Sanyang and Batokunku beaches,” auditors said in the 2018 audit of government accounts published in 2021.
“We noted with concern that the said licence was issued without subjecting it to tender. There is a high risk that the licence was awarded based on favouritism.”
Jawara had to partner with the Chinese to be able to execute the mining contract, sources familiar with mining operations informed The Republic. On 27 September 2022, some slight changes were made in the ownership where two Chinese— Zheng Chang with 34% shares and Tan Chaochong with 15% — were added. This slashed Jawara’s share to 51%.
Environmental rehabilitation on the backburner
Mining has always been a controversial subject in The Gambia’s coastline communities, with locals often complaining about its devastating impact on their beaches and agricultural lands. The Kartong community, for example, has always been resistant to mining. In 2015, 33 people from the village, including activists known as the Kartong 33, were remanded at the Mile 2 Central Prisons for protesting against black sand mining in their community. The former president, Yahya Jammeh, eventually dropped the charges against them following condemnations.
Since 2015, no mining company has obtained a licence to mine in Kartong. In 2022, a company, Gam Quarry Mining Company, was given approval, but this was met with heavy resistance, and the matter died down without any mining taking place there.
Last year, there was an uproar in Kartong regarding an agreement between some members of the community backed by the village head, allegedly impersonating the Village Development Committee (VDC), and GACH on mining black sand. The mining company confirmed signing this agreement, according to media reports.
However, the organiser of the village’s VDC, Mustapha Bojang, denied these claims. Bojang said GACH had expressed interest in restarting mining black sand in Kartong since early 2024, but they asked the company to go “through the right channel.’’
Whether in Kartong, Tujereng, Sanyang or Batokunku, the past and present mining operations have left devastating environmental impacts, leaving behind large craters and pools of fallen trees. An official investigation by the Janneh Commission into the financial dealings of the former president recommended a halt of all mining operations and execution of environmental programmes. Instead of doing this, GACH, which received its licence barely three months after the commission started investigations, continued mining unabated.
The country’s National Environment Agency claimed the company has received all environmental approval licences. However, the agency could only provide approval certificates for GACH’s operations in Tujereng and Batokunku. The ones for Sanyang and Brufut remain outstanding.
In 2020, the former head of the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) at the NEA, Lamin Camara, said they were unaware of GACH’s operations in Sanyang. In a statement GACH later issued in response to the story, the company admitted operating for a year without any environmental approval, though it faced no consequences.
In fact, records obtained by The Republic show that the mining company was issued a stop notice by NEA, after which it was given a two-month provisional licence from January to March 2021. The records NEA shared with The Republic show the company had no environmental approval anytime before or after this period for its entire operation in Sanyang, which clearly violated environment laws.
In 2020, GACH claimed to have been working on a proposal to turn the mined zones into a ‘large-scale tomato farm’ and provide “free seeds and fertiliser to the farmers”. It also proposed ‘converting’ “depressed areas into fish farms to guarantee the supply of fish to the communities”. The mined zones, years after they were mined, remain unrehabilitated, let alone put into productive use. When contacted for comment, GACH said it had paid D1.2m to the Department of Parks and Wildlife to plant 1500 trees in the mining area in Brufut. “We have also rehabilitated the former mine site in Batokunku and launched a coconut tree planting exercise in that area in association with the VDC and Youth Groups,” the company added.
In February 2025, the NEA confirmed that GACH did not renew its licence for Tujereng and Batokunku. However, the firm has continued its mining operations in those areas over a year after its environmental approval licence expired. GACH confirmed this but argued that one environmental approval should be sufficient for mining operations on “the coastal zone with similar environments and impacts,” a claim that has no basis in law.
The company’s environmental approval licence obtained by The Republic through an Access to Information request shows its licence for Tujereng and Batokunku expired on 10 January 2024. The company also appeared to have received environmental approval for its operations in Tujereng before it filed its assessment with the NEA. GACH’s EIA report for Tujereng is dated January 2024, but NEA issued an environmental approval licence to the company in January 2023.
“If there is an EIA, all of them will be in jail by now. Tujereng people cannot have access to the beach… Do you see the buffer between the shoreline and the sea? That is less than 15 metres…They have cut all the trees. All the baobab trees there are gone, and no one has held them accountable,” said Lamin Sonko, an environmental activist and member of the environment committee of the Village Development Committee in Tujereng.
Non-transparency over revenue declaration
The story of mining in The Gambia is a story of secrecy. The details of the contract between GACH and the government remain shrouded in secrecy. When The Republic used the country’s Access to Information law to request a copy, the Ministry of Energy declined to provide it. In February, The Republic filed a complaint before the ATI Commission. It remains unaddressed to date.
However, in 2020, the former minister of energy, Fafa Sanyang, told journalists that the government has a 60 per cent share in the net profit of the mining firm.
Not only are the procurement and contract processes done in secrecy, but the revenue is also not publicly declared. The records obtained by The Republic from the Gambia Ports Authority show that GACH exported at least 1,599 containers of black sand between 2017 and 2022, an estimated 43,173 tons.
The former minister Sanyang told lawmakers in March 2019 that a ton of black sand was being sold at $150, though a former director of the mining company until December 2018, Alhagie Sillah, said they were selling a ton at $200.
“We offered 200 US Dollars per metric ton, out of which 60% goes to the state after all the expenditures,” said Sillah. The Republic estimates the total revenue to be US$8,634,600 (D622,701,360) with a ton of $200 or $6,475,950 (D466,686,679) with a ton of $150.
Despite this, the revenue from black sand mining was not declared in the budget except in 2022, when D154.8m was recorded as proceeds from mining minerals.
“The National Budget does not explicitly show revenue receipts from black sand mining. At least not since 2020. If the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, or a department under it, was the entity tasked with collecting revenue from the black sand mining, it should have reported the receipts in the budget, that’s the required practice”, said Lamin Dibba, an economist with the Gambia-based Centre for Budget and Macroeconomic Transparency.
But the government also failed to properly monitor GACH’s shipment, calling into question how it determined its 60% share of net profit. In 2019, the Auditor General said the government solely relied on GACH to verify the number of shipments made.
“There is a risk that the proportion of revenue remitted to the government of the Gambia is understated since no control is in place to monitor or confirm shipment,” said the auditors. Our request for the audited accounts of the company and its export records from the Ministry of Petroleum, Geology Department and GACH using the ATI also went unanswered, a complaint about which is still before the Commission.
Secrecy over contract, agreements continues
Despite our request, neither GACH’s contract with the state nor its agreement with the communities’ Village Development Committees (VDC) was released to The Republic. The Republic filed a complaint, which is being processed by the country’s Access to Information Commission after over 60 days of failing.
“Only the current VDC can tell you what agreement they signed on the black sand… We are not fortunate to see one single document about this,” said Lamin Sonko.
After several weeks of follow-ups, The Republic received a draft copy of the MoU GACH has with Tujereng VDC. The story is the same with Sanyang VDC. The Chairman of Sanyang VDC— Abdoulie Gaye— promised to share the agreement with us, but he never did, despite several follow-ups.
Gaye claimed that the company had already restored the first site in Sanyang, Banko, mined by GACH. When The Republic visited the site, the evidence was far from the picture Gaye painted. The land was barren and dry.
The Republic’s visits also appeared to have been keenly monitored. The GACH officials reportedly lodged a complaint with Gaye about our site visit. In Batokunku, on our first visit, the security stopped us from taking photographs, saying “these would be shared on social media and people will start making noise again.”
Despite our calls and visit to his office, the director of Geology, Alieu Jawo, refused to grant us an audience. Before meeting him at his office, he had already told our reporter that he was going to “get clearance from his principals.” He later claimed he did not get clearance.
Selling sand meant for rehabilitation?
The environmental approval certificate that is granted to the mining company requires it to rehabilitate the areas destroyed by its mining activity. The mining operations require sorting black sand from white sand. As part of the efforts, the authority gave GACH the permission to sell 30% of the white sand, whilst using the remaining 70% to rehabilitate the areas destroyed.
However, during our visits to the mining sites, we saw no evidence of any rehabilitation. When contacted for comments, GACH insisted that it observed the limits provided under its licence conditions to sell the white sand.
“The construction sand they’re currently selling is supposed to be for rehabilitation purposes of the site,” said Pa Ousman Sanyang, an environmental activist in Sanyang. A similar view was expressed by Lamin Jabang, a member of the Tujereng VDC.
This reporting was completed with the support of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development as part of the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s Open Climate Reporting Initiative.
