Convener of the Media Coalition Against Galamsey, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, has suggested that an assessment of Ghana’s natural resource management should be included in the requirements to be fulfilled for government to receive the second tranche of $600 million from the International Monetary Fund.
According to him, government has failed to protect and properly manage the country’s natural resources resulting in the resurgence of the galamsey menace and its devastating effect on lives and the natural environment.
He noted that had the government properly protected and managed the nation’s natural resources as expected, the country would not have been signed to an IMF currently.
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“We’re sitting in this country and we’ve been told by Al Jazeera documentary the amount of gold that is leaking out of this country. If we got those resources, we’ll not even need to be going to the IMF.
“So I think for me one of the places we’ve gone to now is the next $600 million we’re supposed to be getting we should be asking the IMF to ask us as a people ‘how are you governing these resources that you have to make sure that you’re getting the maximum out of them?’ how difficult would it be for the state to see what Erastus saw and saw Chinese people actually involved in it,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express.
Dr. Ashigbey added that the galasmey menace has been exacerbated by the direct involvement of foreign nationals who have been operating in the country with impunity and in clear contravention of the laws on mining in Ghana.
“If you take the Wassa Goldfields one we’re told that the people who actually led the attack were not Ghanaians, these are other Africans. So we’re sitting in here… and we’re becoming servants to people who are destroying our very survival and we’re allowing that to happen.”
According to him, while the country waits for the government to finally act on the menace, the media and civil society organisations should help educate communities in mining towns and other affected areas of the harmful effects of galamsey.
Such education, he said, will arm the people with the knowledge to push back against any attempts by illegal miners to encroach on their communities.
“So the time has come for us to start letting the local people cross the Ts and Is and do the linkages that these things that are happening, they are not in our benefit so that we can start getting them to revolt. If you get the masses beginning to revolt against this, you know what this would do? Democracy will let some correction happen because if the masses are saying they don’t want this then for the politician who wants the vote, he needs to please them.
“Because we are not doing the linkages properly, these people in these rural communities are not realizing that some of these babies – these octopus babies that they’re having, some of these stillbirths that they’re having, some of these strange diseases that they’re having, the fact that poverty itself is becoming endemic in the places that they’re mining, they don’t see that. So we need to start also educating them.”
He further urged that local leadership including traditional authorities, district chief executives, assembly members, district police commanders among others should be held accountable for their actions and inactions towards the proliferation of galamsey activities in their areas.
“So we need to realise where we are going and things like this should prick all of us our conscience,” he said.
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