Flush out illegal miners on water bodies - Minerals Commission

The Chief Executive Officer of the Minerals Commission, Martin Kwaku Ayisi, has backed calls for illegal miners on water bodies to be flushed out.

He said the Commission has not issued mining permit to any company to mine on water bodies and that anyone mining on any water body is engaging in an illegality.

“Going to mine on the water is a criminal activity. It is not al­lowed. [We have to] just go in and take them out,” he said this in Ac­cra yesterday when he appeared before the Government Assur­ance Committee of Parliament.

According to him, the cam­paign for a blanket moratorium moratorium on all forms of small scale mining were misplaced and would not address the menace but worsen the situation.

He said in as much as some illegal miners breach the terms of their leases, it is important to note that there are thousands who are complying with the mining standards.

“Yes, it is a crisis which needs to be dealt with but there people out there; not just one or two but several thousands, if not millions, who are not connected to illegal mining so why don’t you leave them out and deal with what is creating the problem?

“That is why I personally will not recommend a [blanket ban on small scale mining] because there are several thousands who are not involved in the kind of thing that has led us here. We should be careful not to proverbially they’d the baby away with the bath wa­ter. We have tried it before and it didn’t work,” Mr Ayisi stated.

He further cited the ban in 2017 where over GH¢2.2 billion was realised from the export of gold in 2018 when the ban was in effect as a justification of why a blanket ban was unsustainable.

To him, 30 years of inaction by successive governments to sus­tainably create the congenial en­vironment for small scale mining was to be blamed for the current state of mining in the country.

In the long term, he said, there would be the need to resource the Geological Survey Department to undertake a survey of the mineral underground based on which allocations could be made to persons who wish to venture into mining to do so.

Moreover, he explained that Burkinabes and Togolese, with an unreliable technology which wrongly identifies gold beds, Mr Ayisi noted, have teamed up with their Ghanaian counterparts worsening the situation.

If the Geological Survey De­partment is resourced to explore the use of gold catchers, the trial and error approach being used by some miners would be a thing of the past, he indicated.

“The solution to illegal min­ing, if you ask me, 99 per cent is the geological investigations of all the thousands of areas the Commission has designated. So it will take time for us to resolve the problem but we can’t make apolo­gies for [persons mining illegally] on the water bodies. It is illegal so we just have to get rid of them,” he stressed.

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