Gov’t To Begin Vetting Of Small-Scale Miners Today

The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining will from today, Monday, September 3, 2018, begin vetting of all small-scale miners in the country as part of measures to regulate small-scale mining.

The move is in furtherance of the government’s agenda to eliminate illegal small-scale mining and minimise the impact of such activities on the environment. The vetting is also part of the roadmap towards the lifting of the ban on small-scale mining.

The Ministry of Information in an earlier statement directed all registered artisanal and small-scale miners whose licenses were operational as at April 1, 2017, to submit all relevant documentation to the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) Secretariat by post or in person before Friday, September 7, 2018.

But members of the Concerned Small-scale Miners’ Union of Ghana have said they are unhappy with the committee’s vetting process.

President of the Group, Michael Kwadwo Peprah speaking to Class FM said: “Government is asking too much, we know what the law says about small-scale mining, we know the rules, we know the regulations.

“We know you need your license in order to engage in small-scale mining, but they are demanding our birth certificates, they are demanding our TIN number, they are demanding operation permit and as a matter of fact, we know that for the time that we have been at home, a lot of our members do not have the operational permit. You need that permit to commence operation and it has a time duration, you only get it for a year and we’ve been in the house for one year six months now and they are asking for that operational permit which they know we won’t get.

“So if the government is asking all these things including our birth certificates, including our voters ID number then they know they are asking too much. You can’t tell us to do this and that without any recourse to the law and that is our problem. You don’t sit down and order for this and that meanwhile what you are ordering for cannot work.”