Activities of illegal mining around a water body
It has been weeks – not days – since the President sent a contingent of soldiers into mining communities to flush out illegal miners.
In the current surfeit of information readily available via both regular and social media, no one can pretend ignorance about a directive from government urging everybody in illegal mining to freeze activity.
About three weeks into the directive, it is intriguing how a section of Ghanaians would decide to flout the directive or play hide and seek with the military, thinking the crucial decision by the President was a sick joke and a nightmare.
Political complicity
More annoying is the fact that people who admit we have a collective responsibility to tidy up and start afresh continue, by their arguments, to encourage the perpetrators to stay in the forests and along the water bodies. In essence, they want them to continue committing the crimes that jeopardise our health and fortunes as well as our collective heritages.
Instead of joining the debate for a sanitisation of the mining sites, their propaganda schemes are compelling them to twist the angles of the debate to ‘what’ to do or not with the ‘illegal’ logistics and equipment that assail the sanctity of our rich and endowed environment.
So, while each passing day should be narrowing the debate to issues about cleaner waters and reclamation efforts, we still find ourselves caught in the ‘human face’ thing about the hulks that are used as instruments of degradation of our natural resources.
Stakes
In the process, such people appear to ignore the sacred facts about the quality of water that we deserve to drink and the rate at which it is diminishing. They also ignore issues about our life expectancy getting lower, while the health of communities and their residents, together with those of all persons downstream, are threatened.
Additionally, they ignore the facts about our cocoa and other export crops in the affected regions getting contaminated, among others.
Certainly, for those who understand the issues, the stakes are higher than the levels of debate we are dragging ourselves into by pretending to be more protective and caring than our leaders who have the mandate to promptly fix the situation the best way they can.
Real costs
In the opinion of the Daily Statesman, the real question we should be asking ourselves is what we stand to lose in terms of threats to our Planting for Food and Jobs, Planting for Export, Youth in Entrepreneurship, Youth in Agriculture and our aspirations to lead in both gold and cocoa production.
Additionally, we must also look at the issues in the light of our potable water reserves and how we can sustain all our development goals, including providing sustainable energy resources to fire our industrial transformation agenda, if we engage in the kindergarten angles to the nauseating illegality.
The truth
In addressing the matter, the President, as first citizen of the land, has looked at the arguments and submitted that anybody who feels the government may be wrong in its approach should go to court.
In our opinion, those who are sympathising with the perpetrators in the light of the worth of the equipment alone – without looking at the larger Ghana picture – must ask ourselves where an armed robber stands in the eyes of the law, if he is confronted by patriotic citizens and has his or her shoulders slashed with his or her own machete in the process.
If that criminal can go to court, he must also convince the court that he is no criminal – and provide evidence to that effect.
But he must also remind himself that, that evidence includes his machete or AK47, or in this case, the changfans and excavators, and whether he or she has a right to carry that and at that moment, and also into that environment.
That is aside of what he or she intended using that implement or logistics for.
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