Illegal mining activities
Reader, please if you can connect to the Internet with your phone or computer, go to: https://www.adomonline.com/forests-under-siege-military-command-shares-experience-fighting-off-illegal-miners-in-apamprama-forest-reserve/
There, you will find a sample of the reaction to the continued devastation of our forest reserves, by the personnel charged with ending the outrage.
“They [the galamseyers] are heartless!” (one says).
“I cannot believe it! [the devastation]” (he adds}.
Who can doubt the sadness and anger with which these sentiments are expressed? Mind you – the sentiments are coming from the likes of you and me, but quarters where personnel are expertly trained to suppress their emotions and act on commands (whether they agree with the commands or not!)
You would agree that the provocation that arouses such reactions is immense, wouldn't you?
Now, please ask yourself: Why do we allow a few conscienceless individuals – no matter how highly placed they are in society – to cause such a disruption of decent norms as to move some of their fellow countrymen to tears?
What has not been tried to try and persuade them to cease their destructive activities?
Didn’t the NPP Government send hundreds of them to the institution at Tarkwa that teaches would-be miners how to engage in safe and scientific mining without damaging the environment? When they were going, didn’t the Government pay them subsistence allowances to help them and their families keep body and soul together for the duration of their courses?
Didn’t the Government register them and facilitate the issuing of licences to them to engage in safe mining? Did the licences allow them to MINE, where only prospecting was intended?
Why have the good intentions of the Government towards “small-scale miners” boomeranged against it to such an extent that it is now being openly accused of being confused, unrealistic or even conspiratorial, in its approach to the galamsey problem?
Now, please go to Google and look up the entries under the subject, galamsey.
You will retrieve and read about:
Fellow Ghanaians – including school children – falling into uncovered pits filled with foul water, and drowning;
Farmers are no longer able to walk to their farms because rivers and streams have been diverted by galamseyers from their natural course and brought to bog up and turn into marshland, the safe paths to food farms;
Houses are no longer habitable because their foundations have been weakened by galamseyers who dig around and beneath them – in search of gold.
Making rivers and streams whose water is no longer potable because mercury, cyanide and other poisonous chemicals have been filtered into them in the course of separating gold dust from sand and pebbles (as is carried out during a galamsey operation); and such unsightly sights around the environs of formerly beautiful villages and hamlets as turns the stomachs of villagers who might have travelled and are coming “back home”.
(I’ve seen this with my own eyes whenever I have gone to my hometown, Asiakwa, and passed through Akyem Adukurom, (formerly Kyerepong); Tetteh or Sagyimase. And as for what is done to farmlands, I swear I wept copiously like a baby when I last visited my father’s best farm – Suponso.
“They are heartless!” (said the official).
“They have no conscience!” (he added.)
But what can we do? Quite a lot. I have suggested many times that the Government should assist our chiefs to reorganise and reinvigorate the “Asafo” groups which the chiefs inherited from their ancestors but which they have largely allowed to die – sometimes for political reasons.
You see, some chiefs cannot remain neutral in party politics, especially when they perceive that party politics might reap rich rewards for them. Once a chief offends one or the other of the two main political parties, the offended party would attempt to have him destooled.
It is sad when a chief falls victim to his greed. For our ancestors set great store by the chiefs they enstooled: They drummed it literally, with "taking drums" into the ears of every chief:
“Yemmfre wo ohene kwa!
‘Panin kwa!
Ohene kwa!
‘Panin kwa!” {We don’t call you ‘Chief’ or ‘Elder’ for nothing! No, not for nothing!)
So, as a chief steps out, decked in fine cloth and golden trinkets, a colourful umbrella twirling above his head and his hands and arms dancing to the drums being beaten behind him in his palanquin, he is being told to watch his step.
With the connivance of the British colonialists (who used to effect what was called “indirect rule”), our chiefs have managed to emasculate many of their “Asafo” groups.
But what a “government” could undo, "another government” can reinstate. The example of Winneba or Effutu (where men and women can be mobilised each year to go in their "Asafo” groups to risk the unknown dangers of the deep bush and catch deer alive and bring the animals home for customary purposes) we know “Asafo” groups can be resurrected.
They can be deployed to guard rivers and streams; to trap galamseyers going to wreak havoc on farmlands; and to stone, or otherwise immobilise excavators, changfangs and other galamsey paraphernalia.
Self-defence is not, and cannot, constitute an offence under the law. Nor can people engaged in self-defence be frustrated, with abstruse legal arguments or neglected duty by Government law enforcement agencies and lawyers.
“Were they coming to our lands and rivers to wreck them?”
“Yes. And we caught them and prevented them from harming our property”
Case closed? Who would dare say “No”?
