Was Anglo-Gold’s John Owusu a galamsey bully?

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

Garden City, New York

Feb. 15, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I either lost or had several of my relatives buried in Ghana this February – namely, Messrs. Samuel Nicholas Kwadwo Adu, former West African Table-Tennis Champion and longtime lab technician at New York City’s Downstate Medical Center; Nicholas Yaw Ofosuhene-Appenteng Sintim, former Brong-Ahafo Director of Economic Planning and Math and Economics teacher at the Ofori-Panin Secondary School; and Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa North…there are one or two others whose names I cannot readily recall – and so it is a bit difficult for me to be writing critically about Mr. John Owusu, the Anglo-Gold Ashanti Communications Director, who was reportedly “freakishly” mowed down by a vehicle owned by the transnational extractive company for which he worked and which vehicle he had used to reportedly engage in a systematic harassment of unregistered private miners in the Obuasi vicinity just the other day (See “John Owusu Was A Friend And Brother” The Chronicle 2/11/16).

By all accounts, it appears that the deceased, himself a trained and a quite remarkable journalist by Ghanaian standards, and the holder of the MBA degree from the UK, delighted in using the media spotlight to showcase his new-found power to make life unpleasant for these economically marginalized bona fide Ghanaian citizens, for the most part, who were trying to eke a fairly decent living by engaging in this most dangerous and environmentally destructive of trades. I partly grew up at Akyem-Asiakwa, and so I am fully aware of the extreme dangers that life as a Galamsey prospector or winner entails.

Many times while growing up, I came dangerously close to being swallowed by a disused mine pit on my late uncle’s farm. Many of you knew my eldest maternal uncle as the Rev. Lt.-Col. H. H. Sintim-Aboagye, of the 37th Military Hospital and later a Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP) at the Accra Police Hospital. A World War II veteran and a trained nurse-pharmacist, my uncle owned a farm at the foot of the Atiwa-Atweredu Hills where until the 1890s gold was reportedly mined with a vengeance.

To be certain, while I was growing up, and long before Galamsey activities became riotously rampant the way they are today, from time to time, local news reports would reach us about the fatal fall of some residents who had gone gold-winning in some of these abandoned ancient mine shafts.

Mr. Ebo Quansah, whose tribute to his friend Mr. John Owusu inspired this column, painfully, albeit frankly, notes that the dead man was fond of throwing out invitations to the Chronicle’s editor urging him to accompany the Anglo-Gold Communications Director and afford him media publicity whenever Mr. Owusu was poised to embarking on an operational sweep against these Galamsey miners, disdainfully characterized as a nuisance to “legitimate” multinational corporate predators such as the company that he worked for, formerly called the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation.

I was at the place once or twice during the 1980s as a regularly featured performance-poet with Anokyekrom of the Ghana National Cultural Center. On both occasions, aboard the Center’s Neo-Plan bus was the original Agya Koo Nimo, Mr. Daniel Kwabena Amponsah, renowned musicologist and British-trained lab technician at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and his Adadam Agofomma (Players) Group. I have never been to South Africa, but from what I had then read from the history books and borne witness to on the nightly news, the Anglo-Gold campus strikingly recalled the segregated residential arrangement of the Apartheid era.

The Senior Staff Club House in whose regal and capacious auditorium we performed, was strikingly and futuristically removed from the junior, largely African, quarter by light years. And so one can clearly see and understand how and why Mr. Owusu came to smugly buy into the neocolonialist culture at whose high-end he found himself as a quintessential “Afropean” who needed to regally and imperiously amble around and throw his new-found leaden weight about and his giant feet on the necks of the Galamsey squatters.

Fundamentally speaking, however, I recognize absolutely no difference between corporate predators like Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Newmont and the Galamsey winners. Whatever may be envisaged to be the “legitimate” landed concessions owned by these vampiric multinational establishments, do not make the latter any less environmentally destructive than their decidedly marginal Galamsey counterparts. Recently, we have even learned that there actually exists a symbiotic or mutually beneficial operational arrangement between these “legitimate” transnational predators and their local “parasitic” and “illegal” Galamsey counterparts that we had never before been made aware of.

Well, as fate would have it, Mr. Owusu had been run over by the very vehicle into which he had packed himself and a handful of corporate vigilantes to rough up some Galamsey squatters on some Anglo-Gold Ashanti concessions. In the heat of a seismic backlash from some rattled Galamsey operatives, we are told, Mr. Owusu had made a dash for his corporate vehicle at just about the same moment that the besieged driver of the vehicle was backing up and rearing to escape the wrath of the Galamseyers and gotten mercilessly crushed. A tragic death, indeed, but also a word to the wise, nevertheless.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs