Impose stiff Sentences on Galamsey Miners!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Following the pit-collapse death of some five illegal gold miners in the Prestea-Huni Valley district of the Western Region, the Member of Parliament for the area, Mr. Adu-Blay Koffie, was reported to have suggested that the Government ought to allocate “concessions to the illegal miners and task the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as the Minerals Commission (MC) to monitor their activities, in order to help save the nation’s forest reserves and water bodies as well as human lives” (See “Five Galamsey Miners Trapped to Death” spyghana.com 2/9/12).

Actually, what the Government needs to do is to rigidly enforce the ban on illegal mining and severely punish scofflaws. For starters, the practice of “Galamsey” is a proscribed activity because unlike the traditional mining companies, these small-time and small-scale miners use technological methods that are decidedly substandard and relatively primitive, thus the constant and perennial danger that such activities pose to the actors involved.

Asking the central government to protectively intervene in the activities of Galamsey operators would add an additional burden to an already woefully underequipped and understaffed Environmental Protection Agency; unless, of course, the cost of the added burden of expanding the EPA’s purview to include Galamsey operators will be absorbed by the latter group itself.

In reality, what the Government ought to be doing is to be massively expanding the National Youth Employment Program (NYEP), by setting up long-term job-training programs; for by and large, Galamsey is the underemployed citizen’s most immediate and practical answer to abject economic deprivation.

The foregoing, of course, implies the need for the central government to create jobs rapidly enough in order to catch up with the country’s fast-growing population. Barring the latter, the Government has to induce a business-friendly environment in order to attract a remarkable percentage of both local and foreign investors. And what is more, jobs, as would be created both by the Government and private investors, ought to be gainful enough to motivate potential employees to give of their maximum best. It is, indeed, the absence of the preceding which is squarely to blame for the dangers of Galamsey.

So far, the Mills government appears to be far less concerned about job creation and, rather, more hell-bent on normalizing the chronic canker of executive horns-woggle, or extortion, of the public dole, as it were. Strikingly ready cases in point are the STX and the Woyome “Gorgormi” scandals. In the former case, rather than boost up the capacity and gainfulness of the nation’s real-estate industry, the Mills-Mahama administration decided to cede such vital enterprise to a South Korean firm whose industrial performance and reputation were at best middling. And in the latter instance, rather than exercising fiscal responsibility with the public dole, President John Evans Atta-Mills and Vice-President John Dramani Mahama chose to look the other way while key cabinet appointees facilitated the wanton scamming and siphoning of the public dole into the pockets and wallets of party movers and shakers in the dubious name of “judgment debts.”

What needs to drastically change, right now, in order for the country to healthily progress, is for Ghanaian voters to constructively deemphasize partisan and/or ideological proclivities and, instead, settle on leaders of proven and even-handed leadership. In other words, what seem to be sorely lacking on the contemporary Ghanaian political landscape are statesmen and women to whom the geopolitical notion of Ghana resonates with all that is evocative of a shared destiny and common cultural values that foreground honesty, altruism and forthrightness of purpose.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of the Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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