I’m uncertain what about Galamsey, it is being suggested has not been understood.
Just as the moral dubiousness of saying: “Asiama and Forson need the money,” strikes me as a stupendous blunder.
That line of thinking, however well-intended, is dangerous in the extreme.
Galamsey has moved from being a minor vice, a small community problem caused by peasants “gathering and selling gold” they find close to the surface of the earth.
It is now a national political-economy problem, one which – believe it or not – has existential repercussions to our society.
It has assumed the dimensions of a national crime, an unrestrained and destructive national emergency; one that echoes with the reverberations of wilful political neglect by the political classes.
Left unchecked, it will destroy our entire ecological legacy to the next generations. After, it has made us all less whole; physically, mentally and morally.
Galamsey will be a fatally repugnant bequest to the unborn.
When politicians in this Santa Claus democracy screamed they had solutions to this problem – and both major sides did – were they lying to us?
If they were not, and I do not think they were, then how could they not have understood the problem?
Galamsey is one of the most studied problems I know of in African history.
This was on full display when the Ghana Academy of Arts & Sciences devoted almost a week to discussing it. Resulting in a public statement being issued that was, in my view, an emblematic example of how well understood the root causes are. And, it seems to me, of GAAS at its most useful,
Our academics, going as far back as the early ’70s, limiting myself to papers I have actually read, have detailed in well researched publications , the anatomy of Galamsey; in terms of its causes and effects.
The media, represented by people like Erastus Asare-Donkoh, just to give one example, have done an extraordinary job in educating us about this problem.
As has the Anti-galamsey coalition. And many others.
What then remains to be understood, my brother? For which we need 3 days, 3 months, or 3 years? To do what?
And a referendum? On what?
Whether we should continue to damage the environment, so we can report stabilisation of the Cedi? This would be the most banal face of Neoliberalism on display.
For, that seems to be more vile than justifying the Transatlantic slavetrade with capital accumulation.
The solutions to Galamsey are well known; in many places, by several experts, who have capably articulated, and properly studied this deleterious canker..
What remains, is the political will. Does it exist in our Santa Claus democracy?
For, at its core and from every pore, galamsey drips with the industrial scale graft and sleaze that characterizes Santa Claus Democracies.
That is the key question. Only a purposeful state with determined leaders can solve this problem. Not civil society. This matter should not be placed on the back of civil society as its responsibility.
Akufo-Addo, as president and commander-in-chief, rightly so, in my view, was expected to lead the resolution; he failed, abysmally.
Will John Mahama be different? Or will he too, like his immediate predecessor, suddenly freeze like a statue before the blood sucking vampire of our society that is Galamsey?
And become: all talk, but; hands off, eyes off, ears off, everything off?
Time alone will tell. But this moral issue, I dare to suggest, will play an inordinate role in determining his legacy.
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