Executive Director of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD Ghana), Professor H Kwasi Prempah, says the fight against illegal small-scale mining requires a special court, investigators and prosecutors.
Possibly, he said, it also requires its own prison.
Prof Prempeh noted that authors have been pussyfooting around the crisis.
“Galamsey, like the opiods menace, must be treated like the crisis that it is. On the Law enforcement side, it needs its own special or dedicated investigators, its own police unit, its own prosecutors, and its own courts, possibly its own prison!
“We are simply pussyfooting around this gargantuan, existential crisis,” he wrote under a Facebook post made by a Research Fellow at the CDD, Dr Kwame Sarpong Asiedu, who had written that “The nexus between galamsey and the illicit opioid market is becoming entrenched.”
Earlier, Convener of the Media Coalition Against Galamsey Ken Ashigbeyinsisted that a state of emergency should be declared in the areas affected by galamsey as part of the fight.
He believes that the state of emergency will provide more impetus to stakeholders charged with the responsibility to nip the practice in the bud.
“We still demand the imposition of a state of emergency in the illegal mining fight. We also need to put in place a system where we can track all active excavators in Ghana,” he said on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, March 22.
Ken Ashigbey further said that efforts should be made to unearth the real owners of the excavators brought into the country for illegal mining.
He suggested that the chassis numbers of the excavators can be used to track the real owners.
“If you take the chassis number you will be able to trace it to who owns it,” he said.
He added, “we should look for the sources of the funding for the excavators, they should trace the money…we are waiting for the Minister to publish the list of those who imported into the country, then we will know who are bringing it.”
The Executive Director of A Rocha, Daryl Bossu also said that a lot of the country’s forest reserves are currently under siege by illegal small-scale miners.
He says the number of forests captured by the illegal miners is more than the 44 put out by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources.
He further noted that the present government inherited the situation. “And I sympathise with them because it gives them a lot of work to do,” he said.
