Collaborative effort crucial to ending galamsey

The most topical issue in the country today has to do with the calls on the government to end galamsey or illegal mining.

The calls so far have come in the forms of demonstrations and expression of views, including newspaper editorials, of which The Ghanaian Times has written countless, the latest being that of October 4, 2024 titled ‘Stop galamsey or it sinks country’.

Currently, there are no indications that the calls are going to end now because the people want to see the expected result – end of galamsey and its attendant devastation of the country’s lands and water bodies.

No one should see the calls to end galamsey as the repetition of the previous ones and that at the end of it all, the heat would die down or the dust would settle.

The repeated calls means insistence and The Ghanaian Times supports that because certainly, the galamsey menace has to be fixed.

However, The Ghanaian Times, after some reflection, has to share in the perspective the Board Chairman of the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF), Professor Douglas Boateng, has brought to the galamsey fight narrative.

He says the blame game and accusation of the government will not address the menace bedevilling the country, and so has called for collaboration of all stakeholders in the country to help tackle and end it.

He made his position public at the Boardroom Governance Summit (BGS) in Accra on Tuesday.

We find it easier to share in that perspective because earlier on Friday, last week, we had stated in part in our editorial for the day that there is no doubt successive political administrations have attempted to stop the heinous activity, but all the attempts, including the war waged by the Akufo-Addo administration, have failed.

That is to say that if stopping galamsey and its devastation were that easy, the menace wouldn’t have persisted.

In that same editorial, we said, “Anytime The Ghanaian Times has to talk against galamsey, it does not mince words in its stance that there are three groups of people who are front liners in the fight against galamsey – politicians, the chiefs and the security services.

Currently all the blame and accusations are heaped on the government alone, but we need to take a break and reflect over the situation.

Clearly, some of the blame or accusations are meant to score political points against the government.

The question is, is it only the Akufo-Addo administration that has declared a war against galamsey in the political history of this country?

We should cease attempts to make political capital out of a menace that is threatening the very existence of all Ghanaians.

We all should put the national interest first and collaborate to fight the menace, led by the government, chiefs and the security services and the judiciary.

Should the political administration change for another to take over in the midst of galamsey, the entity we call government will remain so except that the human make-up would change and get confronted with the same menace, or even its worst form.

Let’s therefore collaborate as a nation and see stopping galamsey as a national cause for the national good rather than a problem whose solution should come from a particular person or group.