Forestry Commission investigates staff involvement in illegal operations

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• obi 9 years ago

  they should be dismiss if they are involve and even be jail

  they should be dismiss if they are involve and even be jail

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• Habib 9 years ago

  So many years of illegal deals from top to down in the Forestry Department, then to Ghana Forest Service and nothing has changed. Very corrupt establishment with crooks in the Accra, Regional and District offices - Very shame ...
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  So many years of illegal deals from top to down in the Forestry Department, then to Ghana Forest Service and nothing has changed. Very corrupt establishment with crooks in the Accra, Regional and District offices - Very shameful indeed!!!

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• G. K. Berko 9 years ago

  This action by the Forestry Commission may have come a little too late but as the saying goes, it is better to be late than never doing what is right.
  
  In 2013, when I visited back home to Ghana, I was deeply distraught, in ...
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  This action by the Forestry Commission may have come a little too late but as the saying goes, it is better to be late than never doing what is right.
  
  In 2013, when I visited back home to Ghana, I was deeply distraught, in fact, driven to tears, by the massive unprecedented destruction of our Forests that I saw.
  
  I had the occasion to visit the Offinso area and therefore saw, first-hand, the unbelievable loss of the Sky-hugging Forest Trees that had since hundreds of years defined the biome of the area. The saddest thing that hit me the most was the total absence of the Teak Plantations that used to beautifully reach either side of the Tekyiman-Kumasi Highway, in both the Opro and Afram Headwaters Forest Reserves, around Abofour.
  
  A myriad of questions begun pouring into my mind but all seemed to lead to only one answer: the complete neglect and corrupted exploitation of our Forest Estates.
  
  When I got the chance to interact with some of the former employees of the Forestry Department who helped established the Plantations, the overwhelming reaction was that the Teak assets from the Plantations had been wantonly exploited with hardly any efforts to ensure their regeneration. And that sordid situation of the Plantations had been added to the suspected bureaucratic complicity in unregulated and unlicensed felling of the native species.
  
  Many heartbreaking stories about the state of our Forests emerged from those conversations I had with these former workers of the Forestry Department. But a few were very personal to me that time and space would not allow me delve into now.
  
  When I arrived in Ghana on that visit, I flew over from Accra to Sunyani, and had the opportunity to see, both at the beginning and ending of the flight, at low altitude, much of the flora layering of the Forests from above and there was striking evidence that our Forests had been so badly treated in other areas other than the Offinso area that I visited on the ground.
  
  So, the devastation of our Forests has been a long-existing retrogressive phenomenon that our Forestry Commission failed to appropriately address all these long years, till now.
  
  Time is not on our side, and this action taken by the Commission, now, on the situation in the Asenanyo Forest Reserve must not be only a nine-day wonder but the beginning of a real concerted effort to stem the loss of our Forests.
  
  I have always said for a while now that Ghana's decision to import Wood from abroad to supplement our local needs fully indicts our Governments and the Forestry Commission for their complicity in neglecting the long-running devastation of our Forests. It is therefore incumbent upon the Government and Forestry Commission to fulfill their mandate of being our guardians in charge of preserving our Forests and the sustainability of those invaluable, life-supporting assets. Millions of Ghanaians who have been earning their livelihood from the presence of our Forests are now at grave danger of losing that natural resource.
  
  The action of the Commission must therefore be extended to all other parts of the Country to weed out any corrupt Forestry Official whose actions are counter to the expectations of his or her duties, and allowing the ongoing devastation of the Forests.
  
  Long Live Ghana!!!

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