Activities of illegal mining around a water body
For those who believe that it is good tonic playing politics with galamsey and the environment, the exploding truth in our face is that we really have no options than tidy our minds and the political space some choose to ‘fool’ on.
Again, for those who regard the Millennium Development Goals as development options, rather than standards and international mandate, the imperative now is re-think our stand and fall in step with civilised principles of good governance.
Only days ago, we heard reports that we face a ban on Ghana’s cocoa over land degradation from galamsey, unless we tidy up our mining structures and prove that we can mine gold sensibly and lawfully, and make money for ourselves and Ghana, without infecting our cocoa plantations with dangerous chemicals.
Sordid fact
We are told that the delicate report came from the Deputy Chief Executive in-charge of Agronomy and Quality Control at COCOBOD, Dr Emmanuel Agyemang Dwomoh, when he delivered a speech at the National Consultative Dialogue on Small Scale Mining held in Accra.
He said if this threat was carried out, it would have dire consequences on Ghana’s cocoa sector, given that Ghana exports 80 per cent of its cocoa to the European Union.
He added that the EU had threatened to take that course of action as a result of the galamsey activities.
Galamsey effects
As the experts have told us, the impact of these mining activities on cocoa production is enormous. They include crop loss; reduction in crop yield and income; loss of vegetation; threats to the fertility of the crop because the soil is destroyed; and early dropping of immature pods, as a result of the chemicals that galamsey economic actors apply on the land.
Acting pig-headed in degrading our forests, arable lands and rivers in the quest to bastardise the belly of the earth certainly puts us in economic and developmental jeopardy. Only in January, the European Union announced that it would contribute €25 million to enhance the economic, social and environmental sustainability of cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Cameroon.
This funding was expected to strengthen the partnership between Team Europe (composed of the EU, its Member States, and European financial institutions) and the three cocoa-producing countries, and aims at ensuring a decent living income for farmers, halting deforestation and eliminating child labour.
Certainly, such a programme is in the national interest of the beneficiary countries.
That is why during the opening of the Consultative Dialogue last week, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo called for a candid and non-partisan discussion on issues relating to small scale mining in the country.
Considering that cocoa is a major international revenue earner, while gold is also our other golden egg, we need no politician or propagandist to tell us that we need to have an eagle eye on zones that produce those commodities for our national good.
We believe President Akufo-Addo is right when he cautions that certain conversations should go beyond partisan politics and rather assume national consensus and national effort.
Responsible conversation
As he noted, certain occurrences, especially in the run-up to last year’s elections, had inspired his insistence on the whole nation having a national conversation on ‘galamsey’ so that because “Ghana is not made up of only the humans, but is also made up of the soil, the mountains and valleys, the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the seas, and the plant and animal life as well, all of us with huge stakes in our national resources will collectively unite in nurturing such resources for ourselves and our future generations.”
Collective task
It is in this vein that we urge those who, for instance, condemned the Free SHS programme only to claim political benefits from it during the last general elections to join the collective chorus for a regulated scheme for mining, and a framework for managing funds that accrue from our national resources in a manner that helps develop our nation faster.
That, in our opinion, is the responsibility of the various political parties, as well as civil society, traditional rulers, the clergy, business community, academia, youth associations and all other opinion leaders at all levels of our national life.
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