Dear Nana Addo, galamsey should not be your legacy. Wake Up Sir!

Ours is to publish the truth without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. Nothing but the truth. Watchdogs and not lapdogs…and here we go:

The President, Nana Akufo-Addo, may mean well in his anti illegal mining campaign but he may end up as the President in office when galamsey boomed the most in the country; a rather sorry testimonial that may be one of the legacies for which he would be remembered by posterity if he does not really revive the waning energies for this fight against illegal mining.

If this current situation is the expected results of the galamsey fight, then, our President, Nana Akufo-Addo, had no business telling the country in 2017 that he had put his presidency on the line with a commitment to end the illegal small scale mining popularly in Ghana.

If his “presidency” was truly put on the line, he should have stepped down from office by now because the galamsey business seems to have become a free-for-all illegal but highly lucrative business happening in 13 out of the 16 Regions in the country.

The President cannot say he is proud of the results achieved so far. If he is proud of the results, then clearly, someone is not telling him the truth about the actual situation on the ground and he would need his own privately instituted inquiry to get the raw facts and scary truths.

The facts stink. The evidence of illegal small scale mining abounds. Galamsey has now extended from the forest reserves and under water-bodies into the residential enclaves of towns and villages in the country sides.

The water bodies have become once again coloured and polluted with toxic chemicals. Crop farmers are now buying purified water to send to the farmlands to water their crops to feed the nation.

The security services are either becoming overwhelmed or compromised. The very few but genuinely committed persons against the illegal trade are becoming disillusioned.

One wonders why in the midst of this unresolved mining mess, Government would even accept an application from a company seeking prospecting license to mine in forest reserves.
In the midst of this mess, Government is still accepting applications for Forest Entry Permits? Does it not make a mockery of us?

Forget about whether or not the said company in question, belongs to a Regional Chairman of the President’s party. That is neither here nor there. It is such tangents that lead to the politicization of the anti-galamsey fight. And once the politics step in, it blurs the sense of objectivity and logic.

The President cannot continue to tell us he is leading and winning the fight when the evidence on the grounds suggests otherwise.

The recent and ongoing regrettable incident at the Ellembelle District of the Western Region is one vexatious example of a clear involvement of unseen powerful hands in the galamsey trade.

Hands more powerful that those of the District Chief Executive who rather got arrested, handcuffed in public like a common criminal and detained at a police station simply because he was working against illegal miners and had blown an alarm over some missing excavators.

Was that move aimed to break the DCE’s anti-galamsey resolve? Which police officers and unseen hands orchestrated that whole untidy arrest and press statements to make it seem he had done something wrong? Why is the President silent on that matter? Who is being shielded?

Our President seems to have been given a particular hymnbook from which he is singing a song with lyrics different from the real street anthem and evidence based lyrics in the hymnals from which across the galamsey regions are singing.

Truth is, the fight is being lost and the President needs to be told some truth… If his men around him have failed to deliver this truth, the media should not fail him.

Unless, perhaps, he himself so desires to be failed and to fail himself.