Suddenly, all kinds of characters have found their voices to speak against galamsey. When President Akufo-Addo put his presidency on the line in the fight against galamsey in 2017 in the wake of the launch of the Media Coalition Against Galamsey, some of these civil society groups and some media houses lost their power to set the agenda.
Some officials of the Forestry Commission and the Minerals Commission were in bed with the security forces and the galamseyers to undermine the fight. Gradually, the fight entered Election Year 2020, and John Mahama and his NDC found a nice opportunity to seek an alliance with the illegal miners for electoral gain.
Back then, these groups including the Media Coalition Against Galamsey and the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) who are shouting on roof tops today maintained a loud silence pretending not to have heard the assurance by John Mahama to grant amnesty to those jailed for illegal mining if he is elected President. The hypocrisy, populism and the double standards among some media practitioners, Organised Labour, clergy, university teachers and some students have reached a crescendo because these hypocrites are hiding behind the philosophy of neutrality to apparently shore up the campaign of John Mahama.
Now the demands of these groups on President Akufo-Addo is absurd. In civilised settings like our own and having practised democracy for more than three decades, it does not make sense for so-called active citizens to “order” the President to release the demonstrators on remand because the decision by the Accra Circuit Court to incarcerate them for two weeks marks high handedness.
Strangely, former President John Mahama who once served in the high office of President of the Republic has added his voice to such an infantile and undemocratic request. It is like John Mahama and the GJA do not know the working of our Judiciary, and that the President has absolutely no power to interfere with the court’s ruling.
Anybody or group of people dissatisfied with the court ruling can appeal the decision in any of our higher courts. These groups of people are singing the John Mahama song for a ban to be placed on all mining activities because of the concern of a clean source of water, but for political reasons.
Our beef must be against the political actors who want to ride on the back of the anti-galamsey crusade to regain power. The civil society groups, led by the Media Coalition Against Galamsey and the GJA must stop playing the chameleon that changes its colour for expediency, so that all of us can identify the culprits in the mining areas who are bent on posing an existential threat to our survival.
What we need is not the selective strategy where only President Akufo-Addo and his men and women must be identified and flushed out and the country’s challenges will be over. For now, the elements who are up in arms against the government are doing so because there is an election to be won in December.
This galamsey war for political expediency can hardly achieve any results because John Mahama who is screaming all over the place lacks the credibility to deal with the development challenges occasioned by illegal mining. While the NDC stampedes the government to take action against illegal mining, its leaders are in the field urging the galamseyers to continue to pursue their illegal trade.
The solution to illegal mining does not lie in the President declaring a state of emergency with its restrictions.
The civil society groups are advised to desist from using the galamsey issue to rescue the failing bid by John Mahama to return to power.
Architects of the widespread destruction of the environment include the NDC gangs, John Mahama, Kwaku Boahen and Tony Aubyn, campaigning for votes in the mining areas assuring the galamseyers the right to destroy the environment, are apparently behind the groups calling on President Akufo-Addo to end galamsey now.
We challenge John Mahama and the NDC to declare their stand on the menace of galamsey and indicate to us what he did while in power from 2012 to 2016, and what he intends to do in the unlikely event that he regains power.