Fellow Ghanaians,
It’s over a week now since our nation was struck by a tragedy that froze us in grief. We lost eight of our own five senior public servants and three gallant members of the Ghana Armed Forces in a helicopter crash that has left empty chairs in our ministries, our security services, and in homes across this land.
These were not men on a leisurely trip. They were not flying to some comfortable retreat. They were on their way to Obuasi to do the people’s work.
Their mission was to help launch the Responsible Cooperative Mining and Skills Development Programme—rCOMSDEP—a new initiative designed to confront one of the gravest challenges of our time: illegal mining, or galamsey.
This programme, built on three pillars, responsible cooperative mining schemes, skills development and alternative livelihoods, and the restoration of degraded lands was meant to be more than another speech, more than another committee.
It was intended to be a practical step toward saving our land, our rivers, and our communities from the greed that is eating them alive.
And so, Fellow Ghanaians, it would be a betrayal of their memory if we allow galamsey to continue to spread like a cancer across this nation.
It would be an insult to their sacrifice if we bury them, wipe our tears, and then go back to pretending that this problem will fix itself. Because it will not. It hasn’t in the last twenty years. And if we do nothing new, it will not in the next twenty either.
Galamsey is not just a mining issue, it is an existential crisis. Our forests are being stripped bare. Our cocoa farms are disappearing under the scars of open pits. Our rivers—Pra, Offin, Ankobra, Tano, Birim, once lifelines for communities, are now poisoned streams, choked with mercury and silt.
Children in mining areas are growing up with polluted water, poisoned fish, and barren land where nothing grows. Diseases linked to heavy metals are creeping into communities. Families must walk farther and farther for safe water. Farmers are abandoning their fields because their soil can no longer sustain crops.
It is not just the environment, it is our food security, our public health, our very survival as a people that is at stake. We are facing a slow-moving catastrophe that is every bit as dangerous as any war or epidemic. And yet, for too long, we have approached it as though it were a minor inconvenience.
We like to say that gold is a blessing, but for too long in Ghana, it has behaved like a curse. A curse because we have allowed greed to triumph over reason. A curse because instead of harnessing it to build, we have permitted it to destroy.
A curse because those who profit from it, whether they are the small-time digger with a shovel, the politically connected “big men” who finance excavators, or the foreign syndicates that ship our wealth away do so without paying the true price for the devastation they leave behind.
The truth we do not like to say out loud is this: our fight against galamsey has failed because too many people in positions of power benefit from it. We deploy soldiers to mining sites, but some return as protectors of the very illegal operators they were sent to stop.
We pass laws and issue bans, but licences are quietly issued under the table. We seize excavators in the daytime and they vanish by nightfall. We arrest small operators but never the political and business kingpins who bankroll them.
We are not losing the fight because we lack laws or machinery, we are losing it because we lack the collective will to sever the interests that profit from destruction.
We have tried “Operation Vanguard,” “Operation Halt,” river guards, drones, task forces, but each effort collapses under the weight of political interference, corruption, and the simple fact that in Ghana, we have not yet made environmental crimes carry the kind of punishments that scare powerful people.
Other countries have shown that it can be done. In the Philippines, a nationwide crackdown in 2012 shut down over 40 illegal mines in a matter of weeks, prosecuted financiers, and restored thousands of hectares of land.
In Costa Rica, open-pit mining was banned outright, and the government invested in eco-tourism and alternative livelihoods for miners. In Rwanda, strict traceability rules for minerals have made it almost impossible to sell illegally mined gold the open market.
The rCOMSDEP programme that our departed officials were heading to launch offers a way forward, if we take it seriously. Responsible cooperative mining means that communities themselves have a stake in doing things the right way, in following safety and environmental standards.
Skills development and alternative livelihoods mean that young people in mining areas will not have to choose between poverty and poisoning their own land.
And restoring degraded lands means that the scars of galamsey do not remain as permanent reminders of our national failure, but are healed into fertile ground again.
But for rCOMSDEP to succeed, it cannot be yet another beautifully bound policy document gathering dust. It must be backed by resources, by enforcement, and by political courage.
It must mean that if a minister’s nephew or a general’s cousin or they themselves are caught in illegal mining, the law still applies. It must mean that the soldiers deployed to protect mining areas are monitored, held accountable, and removed if they betray their duty.
It must mean that every excavator found in a riverbed is confiscated and destroyed, not quietly returned to its owner.
Fellow Ghanaians, we must also confront the hypocrisy in our own national psyche. Many of us say we oppose galamsey, but we buy the cheap gold it produces. We say we love our rivers, but we look away when a neighbour rents his farm to illegal miners.
We curse the destruction on Facebook, then vote for politicians who protect the financiers. The fight against galamsey is not just about what happens in the bush, it is about the choices we make in our homes, our markets, and our polling stations.
And let us remember this: the fight will not be won in a single year. It will take sustained pressure, legal reform, and the patience to see degraded lands restored and alternative livelihoods take root.
It will require that we measure success not in how many miners we chase off a site, but in how many communities no longer depend on galamsey to survive. It will require leadership that does not change its tune with every election cycle.
The death of these seven men—Dr. Edward Omane Boamah, Murtala Mohammed, Alhaji Muniru Mohammed, Samuel Aboagye, Samuel Sarpong, Squadron Leader Peter Bafemi Anala, Flying Officer Mane-Twum Ampadu, and Sergeant Ernest Addo Mensah—should mark the beginning of a new chapter, one in which we finally decide that enough is enough.
Gold must not be our curse. The rivers must run clear again. The forests must grow again. And the land must be able to feed its people again. If we do not stop galamsey now, there will come a day when no amount of gold will buy back what we have lost.
Let their mission not die with them. Let it live in our laws, in our enforcement, and in our national will. And let us prove, finally, that we are a people who can protect our blessings from becoming our destruction.
Kwaku Asante is a senior broadcast journalist with JoyNews and Joy 99.7 FM. The views expressed in this article are his personal opinions and do not reflect, in any form or shape, those of The Multimedia Group, where he works.
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