What Mode of Living is this, Mr. Mahama?

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

During a two-day working tour of the Central Region, President John Dramani Mahama was reported to have roundly condemned the Galamsey Taskforce, composed of police and military personnel, engaged in radically rooting out the environmentally hazardous activities of illegal mine operators (See "Mahama Condemns Galamsey Taskforce; Says Illegal Miners Are in Business to Make a Living" MyJoyOnline.com 2/27/14).

Mischievously playing to the gallery, as has become characteristic of his political campaign strategy, Mr. Mahama is reported to have smugly asserted that these illegal miners were in business to make a living, to the thunderous applause of a durbar gathering of the chiefs and people of Dunkwa-on-Offin. He would quickly and suavely shift gear by announcing that plans were afoot to securing financial aid from the IMF-World Bank to have these same illegal miners employed as land reclaimers. Barely twenty-four hours after Joy-Fm reported the afore-referenced story, the President's communication advisor, Mr. Ben Dotsei Malor, came out to vehemently contradict the privately owned radio station (See "Mahama Did Not Condemn Galamsey Taskforce - Malor" MyJoyOnline.com 2/28/14).

What makes such equivocal presidential condemnation disturbing is that it flagrantly undermines the entire purpose for establishing the Galamsey Taskforce. I also have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Mr. Mahama's condemnatory speech, reportedly delivered in the Twi dialect of the Akan language, was faithfully reported by the Joy-Fm reporter on the scene.

On the face of it, the president's promised land reclamation project seems laudable and timely, but it is also eerily clear that however many jobs it creates in the offing, may likely not be sustainable in the long term; unless, of course, Mr. Mahama intends to make it a permanent feature of his national development agenda. In the latter instance, that is assuming this to be the case, what would need to be promptly done would be to retrain these illegal miners for such relatively more permanent ventures as building and road construction, as well as other easily marketable skills. This is where the conversion of our many polytechnic and vocational institutes into community colleges comes in handy.

The promise of registering these environmental havoc wreakers and paying them for their land reclamation labor may not be nearly as easy and/or feasible as it seems. Much will depend on whether the wages paid these laborers are reckoned to be comparable to the profits garnered from their former galamsey activities.

I am also skeptical about the president's caustic criticism of the operational mode of the Galamsey Taskforce, being that it is fundamentally informed by the government's generally shabby treatment of Ghanaian citizens. Recently, for instance, we witnessed the same cynical attitudinal rudeness and violence from Mr. Mahama's national security coordinator, when Lt.-Col. (Rtd) Gbevlo summarily caused the early morning demolition of a tollbooth erected by the University of Ghana administrators to recoup loans contracted for campus road-maintenance work, because the government had been either reluctant or simply unable to live up to its responsibility as proprietor of the country's flagship academy.

In the latter instance, President Mahama loudly lauded this vigilante mayhem created by Col. Gbevlo by maintaining a deliberately studied silence on the matter. As of this writing (2/27/14), the Legon authorities were reported to be in the process of petitioning the Mahama government to severely discipline Col. Gbevlo, including either demanding his resignation letter or summarily relieving him of his post. And here, also, it is almost certain that nothing punitively meaningful would come out of such petition.

More so because in the wake of Col. Gbevlo's mayhem, the Flagstaff House was reported to have offered to defray the full-cost of the road maintenance work undertaken by the Legon authorities.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Feb. 27, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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