LOCAL artisanal gold mining or ‘galamsey’, as it is popularly known, has been with us for a very long time. From the Western Region, which is the hub of galamsey, through the Ashanti, Eastern and Brong Ahafo regions, our people struggle daily for survival at the very peril of their lives.
Despite the meagre wages they earn and the physical dangers operators face, galamsey has become a major source of livelihood for persons living in and around mining communities. Unskilled people from other communities across the length and breadth of this country travel to these mining communities to engage in illegal mining, with the aim of making some capital.
Over the years, there have been several attempts and efforts by Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) and the government to bring galamsey operators together and assist them to secure licences to operate as licensed small-scale mining entities, with the aim of having them conform to modern practices of mining.
The Ghana Chamber of Mines, which has been spearheading the talk-shop, has done little to help the galamsey operators secure licences to operate legitimately, despite the calls on these illegal miners to merge into a group to facilitate their acquisition of licences.
But with no definite solution in sight, the Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amotia Ofori Panin, went to town on Wednesday with a call for the arrest and prosecution of any traditional ruler in his area of jurisdiction suspected of promoting the practice.
According to him, any chief who would be found to have collected money and given out land for the illegal miners to operate should be made to face the full rigours of the law without fear or favour.
The Daily Graphic appreciates the concerns of the Okyenhene, coming especially after two siblings — Kingsley Effah Agyeman, 11, and Kofi Darkwa, 15 — met their untimely death in an abandoned galamsey pit at the outskirts of Kyebi, the capital of the Abuakwa South Constituency.
That apart, the horrific deaths of 18 people — 14 of them women — at Dompoase, near Wassa Akropong in the Western Region, in November last year is also fresh in our minds, not to mention the everyday occurrence of people being trapped in pits during galamsey operations.
Another havoc being caused by galamsey operators is the degradation of arable land, the pollution of water bodies with poisonous chemicals such as mercury and cyanide and the destruction of farms and the forest cover.
Perhaps even more frightening is the fact that a 1999 UN study to assess environmental damage caused by artisanal small-scale mining found high blood mercury levels in the area. The study further showed that exposure to mercury could cause brain and kidney damage and that it was dangerous to babies and children.
According to The Global Mercury Project, an organisation devoted to preventing mercury pollution as a result of artisanal mining, 30 to 40 per cent of man-made mercury pollution in the world is a result of small-scale, galamsey-type mining operations.
And it is not only international agencies that are worried about the dangers of galamsey operations. Doctors also criticise the operators for endangering their own lives and the health of the people of the towns where they operate.
The question is: Are we waiting for another calamity to occur before we wake up from our slumber? Or shall we continue to look on sheepishly while the lives of our people are endangered, while the illegal mining activities assume alarming proportions?
The Daily Graphic insists that chiefs collaborating with these illegal miners must dissociate themselves from those illegal activities immediately, while the government also owes it a duty to clamp down on the illegal activities of galamsey operators.
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