Fix body cameras on soldiers deployed to galamsey areas – Asante Okyere

A senior lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Jonathan Asante Okyere has suggested to the government and the military hierarchy to fix body-worn cameras on all the soldiers who have been deployed to the illegal mining areas to tackle the menace.

He explains that the body cameras will record every movement and conversation of the soldiers during the operation to ensure that they are not compromised by the galamseyers.

Dr Asante Okyere indicated that although the soldiers will help in fighting the menace, the probability of them being compromised should not be ruled out.

“Fix body cams on the soldiers, so that everything will be recorded at a centralized point to prevent the soldiers from being compromised,” he said on the Big Issue on TV3 Friday, October 11.

A Security Expert Colonel Festus Aboagye (Retired) has described the deployment of the military to tackle the illegal small-scale mining (Galamseny) menace and also the burning of some chanfans as the laziest approach to tackling the threat to national security.

He questioned how sustainable military deployment is.

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

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?”