Col Festus Aboagye questions govt’s inability to map galamsey environment

A Security Expert Colonel Festus Aboagye (Retired) has wondered why the government has not been able to clearly zone the areas where the illegal small-scale mining (Galamsey) is happening.

To him, mapping the galamsey environment will help in knowing which particular places the galamseyers are to arrest them. Col Aboagye therefore raised issues against the sustainability of the deployment of the military to tackle the illegal small-scale mining menace.

Explaining the reason for his concerns about sustainability,  Col Festus Aboagye referred to the previous situation where the Military was deployed in 2018 and 2019 to the galamsey areas only to leave in the short time for the illicit mining practices to resurge.

His comment comes at a time when the soldiers who have been deployed under the government’s “Operation Halt” initiative to fight against illegal small-scale mining destroyed 18 chanfans, 10 industrial water pumping machines, and one excavator in various illegal mining sites across Ghana.

The destruction formed part of the government’s measures to tackle the illicit small-scale mining menace.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had directed the Minister for Defence to deploy additional military forces to intensify the ongoing operation halt which aims to curb illegal mining activities.

The President also directed the Ministry of the Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation together with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend with immediate effect the enforcement of L.I 2462 on mining in forest reserves.

Speaking on this matter in an interview with TV3’s Martin Asiedu-Darteh on the News 360 Thursday, October 10, Col Festus Aboagye (Retired) said “I think this is the laziest approach to combating any risk and threat to national security. The report is that some 19 chanfans and a certain number of heavy-duty pumping machines have been destroyed [but] where is the figure that over the eight years the state of Ghana has used intelligence to map out the galamsey environment to know how many people in which groups or which river bodies, in which forest reserves are operating? Without that benchmark, you cannot actually determine that. I8 chanfans in the first day is not anything to write home about because we don’t have the baseline against which we want to measure this.

“The second point is that what is the time frame that the government is dealing with? Let us assume that in the short term, we are dealing with six months, what political objectives had been set for the Armed Forces that by six months you should have destroyed 10 percent of Chanfans numbering 50,000 or 20% of Cartapillars numbering one million, you should have arrested X thousand of illegal miners.

“I am really baffled that with all the resources that we have invested in the state of Ghana precisely in this government, with all the technologies that are being acquired for spying on political opponents the state of Ghana cannot deploy resources to map out the galamsey environment so that today the government should have presented us with a better plan. What we have is not a plan, it is just a political gimmick to buy time. If the soldiers are going to be there, for how long? We must look at the sustainability of the efforts. Are they going back as they did in 2018 and 2019 for the menace to surge?”

The post Col Festus Aboagye questions govt’s inability to map galamsey environment first appeared on 3News.

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