A former legal advisor to Operation Vanguard, Ex-Captain Jamal Tonzua Seid, has revealed reasons why the Operation Vanguard initiative failed to attain its aim of ending illegal gold mining in the country.
According to him, the institutions that were supposed to work together to combat the menace lacked effective collaboration.
“If you looked at the entire set-up, you would want to see some effective collaboration between institutions like the Forestry Commission, the Minerals Commission, the Water Resources Commission, the Police Service, the military. You want to see capacity being built. You want to know who has what role so that the whole team effort would be effective.
“But that was obviously missing. And professor Frimpong-Boateng’s report actually said that even some members of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining, they were not really proactive. If not, they were even missing in the whole effort. And so collaboration, inter-institutional collaborations, and then the spelling out of roles and making sure that there will be synergies. That was missing.”
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Mr Seidu made these disclosures on Tuesday, April 25 in an interview on JoyFM’s Super Morning Show.
He stated that he believed the initiative was set-up to fail, stressing that due to the lack of synergy between the highlighted institutions, Operation Vanguard was unable to yield the expected outcome.
Again, the legal practitioner highlighted another factor that he said, hindered the progress of the initiative.
He told the hosts of the Super Morning Show that the office of the Attorney General refused to give his outfit the edict to prosecute the perpetrators.
“I don’t understand why the Attorney General’s Department would not give a fiat to another government lawyer who is willing and capable and available and motivated to prosecute such offences.”
He further insisted that his officials informed him that the request got to the Attorney General, however, the response they received was that he would not be given that mandate.
Operation Vanguard was an initiative launched by President Nana Akufo-Addo in 2017.
The aim of the initiative was to bring an end to illegal mining activities, mostly gold mining, popularly known as galamsey.
With the launch of the initiative, a Joint Military and Police Taskforce (JMF) of 400 personnel, made up of 200 military personnel and 200 police officers, was formed to combat deforestation and pollution in affected areas such as the Ashanti, Eastern, and Western regions.
Although the president, in 2017 asserted that the initiative was yielding a progressive result despite a few challenges encountered, a bombshell report, made by the former Environment Minister Prof Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng on galamsey proved otherwise.
In the report, Prof Fimpong-Boateng alleged that some government officials as well as some presidential staffers, were involved in galamsey.
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