Government’s justification for the failure to punish a Chinese kingpin of illegal mining has been faulted by an international relations analyst.
It betrays a lack of strategic policy between Ghana and China, the Ag. Director of Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Ghana Dr. Lloyd Amoah has observed.
The Chinese kingpin Aisha Huang was deported in December 2018 after the state discontinued its case for reasons which has now been explained by the Senior minister Yaw Osafo Maafo as political.
“That sends us to a whole realm of the kind of general strategic policy infrastructure and within that how we seek to engage China,” Dr. Lloyd Amoah told Joy News Wednesday morning.
”Putting that lady [Aisha] in jail in Ghana is not going to solve your economic problems,” he told Ghanaians in the United Kingdom in a Town Hall meeting.
The 77-year old explained that freeing the lady was part of oiling Ghana’s economic diplomacy with China which is expected to yield $2bn in much-needed infrastructure as contained in the Master Project Support Agreement (MPSA) between Ghana and Sinohydro Corporation Limited approved by Parliament.
The comment has sparked wide condemnation from the public against the government which has been waging an armed fight against illegal miners since 2017.
The opposition NDC also putting the knife in, condemning the Akufo-Addo government for betraying Ghanaians in the fight to protect the environment.
Joining the queue of criticisms, Dr. Amoah said Ghanaians has just woken up to the reality of the mess Chinese Nationals have caused in this country. According to him Ghana slept on its responsibility.
“When you look at the flow of events the last ten years and the presence of the Chinese in the mining sector of our country and the matters that have come up, it is clear that somehow the Ghanaian Republic run by the bureaucrats and politicos has particularly done shoddy job in dealing with this problem,” Dr. Amoah said in exhilaration.
But he argued that even though some work has been done to fashion out a policy for the two countries that remains inadequate since what is lacking is “a grand strategy and tactics.”
He has urged for caution in the handling of the relationship between the two countries as China remains at the heart of present world economic power.
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