Military action against galamsey is a 'lazy strategy' – Security analyst warns of political delay tactics

Colonel Festus Aboagye, a security analyst, has expressed strong concerns about the sustainability of the deployment of the military by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as one of the measures to clamp down on galamsey.

Colonel Festus Aboagye, in an interview with TV3 and monitored by peacefmonline.com, stated that the impact of galamsey in Ghana is profound and poses multifaceted consequences on Ghanaians, adding that the deployment of the military to galamsey sites without any prior collation of data is the laziest approach adopted by the government to tackle the menace.

Col. Festus Aboagye explained that between 2018 and 2019, there was a similar situation where the military was deployed by the President to the galamsey areas only to leave in a short time for the illicit mining practices to resurge.

His comment comes on the heels of a current measure taken by the President to tackle the menace of galamsey, which includes the deployment of the military to the galamsey sites following the threat of Organised Labour to embark on a nationwide strike should the President do nothing about the fight against galamsey.

The President also directed the Ministry of the Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, together with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to suspend with immediate effect the enforcement of L.I 2462 on mining in forest reserves.

In a statement issued on October 9, 2024, by the Office of the President, President Akufo-Addo outlined a number of measures to address concerns raised by Organised Labour.

“The operation will be bolstered by the deployment of naval boats on polluted river bodies to ensure the immediate cessation of all mining activities, legal or illegal, in and around these water bodies,” the statement said.

However, Col. Festus Aboagye said, “I think this is the laziest approach to combating any risk and threat to National Security. The report is that some 19 chanfans and a certain number of heavy-duty pumping machines have been destroyed [but] where is the figure that over the eight years the state of Ghana has used intelligence to map out the galamsey environment to know how many people in which groups or which river bodies, in which forest reserves are operating? Without that benchmark, you cannot actually determine that. 18 chanfans in the first day is not anything to write home about because we don’t have the baseline against which we want to measure this.

“The second point is that what is the time frame that the government is dealing with? Let us assume that in the short term, we are dealing with six months, what political objectives had been set for the Armed Forces that by six months you should have destroyed 10 percent of chanfans numbering 50,000 or 20% of caterpillars numbering one million, you should have arrested X thousands of illegal miners.

“I am really baffled that with all the resources that we have invested in the state of Ghana precisely in this government, with all the technologies that are being acquired for spying on political opponents, the state of Ghana cannot deploy resources to map out the galamsey environment so that today the government should have presented us with a better plan. What we have is not a plan, it is just a political gimmick to buy time. If the soldiers are going to be there, for how long? We must look at the sustainability of the efforts. Are they going back as they did in 2018 and 2019 for the menace to surge?”

Col. Aboagye further advocated for a more comprehensive approach to tackle galamsey, focusing on law enforcement and addressing the root causes of the problem.