The recent awarding of Ghana’s first lithium mining licence to Australia-incorporated, and London AIM-listed, Atlantic Lithium has sparked intense debate. Despite the care that civil society groups have taken to craft thoughtful improvements, the government’s chief mining advisor has responded dismissively, accusing critics of spreading lies.

This unproductive back-and-forth threatens to obscure the vital discussion needed to ensure Ghana harnesses the lithium find to ride the coming green economy wave. Of all the green minerals, considered essential to the energy transition, analysts project the highest demand growth for lithium.

Luckily, under Ghanaian law, Parliament must ratify the lease awarded to Atlantic before they can proceed to mine.

Given the confusion over critical matters, and the passionate disagreements about basic facts, Parliament is the last bulwark against another mediocre mining outcome for the country.

The apostles of low expectations have reiterated at every turn how herculean and costly an endeavour the whole effort to discover lithium has been for Atlantic. Ghana is thus, in this estimation, the lucky beneficiary of a sliver of treasure it had no idea existed and has never toiled for. The sad truth is that this self-deprecating claim is not even correct. It was indeed Ghanaian geological studies that confirmed lithium deposits in the licensed area date more than 50 years ago, and Atlantic’s principals have themselves acknowledged that seminal scholarship by Ghanaian geologists led them to the country.

Though additional exploration was needed to prove reserves to international certification standards, local data supported strong suspicions of commercial viability, defeating the notion that there are no Ghanaian stakes in this success.

Second, Atlantic’s supposedly vast expenditure has been mischaracterised. Though its work further developed Ghana’s understanding of its lithium reserves, early-stage funding came from an offtaker, US-based Piedmont, which must have relied in part on suspicion of commercial deposits than on absolute evidence. The $17m used for the technical studies that confirmed commercial reserves derived from Atlantic selling 50% of production in Eyowaa — the licensed area — to Piedmont. In essence, Ghana’s latent wealth funded the project. Portraying Atlantic as a cash-flush saviour obscures opportunities for more equitable partnerships.

Additionally, even now, confusion remains about the full extent of concessions made to the Atlantic by Ghana. The company claimed last year in presentations to investors that it has secured a 10-year tax holiday from Ghana. Government spokespersons deny knowledge of this.

Atlantic has also revealed that it has special permits from Ghana’s electricity regulators entitling it to tariffs 30-50% below standard industrial rates. No one has denied this. Such concessions make analytical boasts of 50-60% state revenue shares seem fanciful absent fuller disclosure. And if Atlantic, a listed company on a regulated exchange, is lying to its investors about the tax holiday, as some government spokespersons suggest, then there are bigger credibility risks to the whole arrangement that need careful unpacking by Parliament.

Likewise, misrepresenting Ghana’s potential equity stake as an easily secured 30% badly misleads.

The mundane reality is a non-additive 13% stake in the specific local Eyowaa leaseholding company. Securing and holding on to further equity will require complex anti-dilution protections in the agreement covering 6% of the local Ewoyaa holding company and 3% global stake in Atlantic that Ghana’s sovereign minerals fund, MIIF, aims to buy. MIIF’s disclosed terms so far do not include any such provisions. Without clarity in these intricate matters, rhetorical flourishes amount to false assurance.

MIIF has already been exposed for inflated valuation of the Atlantic assets, when it suggested that a short-run 30% increase in Atlantic’s share price to 34 US cents amounted to “gains” since it has a locked-in price of 26 cents. In fact, Atlantic has lost nearly 50% of its value from its peak this year. Compared to Piedmont, MIIF, an equally strategic investor, appears to be valuing the Ewoyaa find by between two times and four times more, depending on which of its recent numbers one chooses to rely upon.

Despite the government’s assurances of its commitment to green minerals value addition, the only thing the agreement requires of Atlantic is a scoping study to determine if a chemical refinery in Ghana would be feasible. Of course, a ‘scoping study’ is much too loose to provide any commercial basis for such an investment. At worst, a scoping study should have been conducted ahead of the lease and the company required to undertake a feasibility study based on clear parameters of success as well as unambiguous value chain indicators for the refinery.

As the opposition promises rigorous scrutiny, and civil society demands better terms, it is clear that rubber-stamping the agreement will make Parliament a traitor in the eyes of the public

Their absence shows the business-as-usual nature of the entire enterprise. Yet, it is based on promises of managing green minerals differently from traditional minerals that led the government to adopt a Green Mining Policy, one that it refuses to publish lest tension between it and the lithium deal be badly exposed. Some opposition politicians insist that there must be a green minerals law, not just a policy, to ensure that Ghana joins the ranks of countries like Chile, Mexico and Zimbabwe that have resolved to prevent the export of low-value lithium.

As the opposition promises rigorous scrutiny, and civil society demands better terms, it is clear that rubber-stamping the agreement will make Parliament a traitor in the eyes of the public. Not when some analysts have set the bar at a regional value chain for lithium-ion batteries pooling complementary raw materials from different countries in the region. But even if Ghana is to content itself with less than batteries, there are higher-value lithium derivatives than the spodumene concentrate that the current deal has set the bar at.

Rather than dismissing critics, which range from the country’s former Chief Justice & foremost Islamic cleric, who are only demanding more clarity and more benefits, the government must engage openly and use the parliamentary process to engineer a national consensus on the way forward for Ghana’s green transformation agenda, starting with lithium.