President of the Concerned Small Scale Miners Association, Michael Peprah, said Ghanaian ‘galamseyers’ are not the threat in the fight against the menace.
He argued that the fight against galamsey would have been won by government long ago if local players were the only ones engaged in the menace.
“If we want to fight against the galamsey menace, then we need to fight the Asians. They are the ones making the galamsey fight hard. When you burn their excavators, they can easily acquire loans to replace them unlike locals. When government even told small scale miners to cease mining for a year we did unlike the Asians,” he told Don Kwabena Prah on Happy98.9FM’s ‘Epa Hoa Daben’ political talk show.
According to him, if this approach is not adopted, the government will only keep wasting taxpayers money.
He charged government to also fight the galamsey menace devoid of politics.
Ghana’s tradition of artisanal gold mining and the gold price boom which began in 2007 led tens of thousands of Chinese migrants to seek their fortunes in Ghana.
Bringing heavy machinery, illegal Chinese gold miners precipitated economic and social instability as well as increases in gun violence, drug trafficking and corruption
Ghana is working hard to fight against illegal mining – or galamsey – but widespread corruption has hamstrung government efforts.
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