Illegal mining and the delamination of Ghana's Gold Coast

It was simply too much to bear, for many people, and definitely for me, to see the lifeless bodies of youngsters being scooped up from the bowels of the earth, by mechanically purring excavators, even as a video recording. 

The menacing claws of metal holding the mortal remains of innocent victims, a monument to our collective neglect of the long-term welfare of the very society to which we belong. 

The circulated videos were as shocking as they were horrifying. Yet another wakeup call that illegal mining, galamsey, as it has come to be known in Ghana - viewed as a throbbing systemic risk - has ominous existential consequences for our society. 

We must tackle it forcefully and with courage and determination, now, or see our country die. Galamsey, must be stamped out, it can.

The current president of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, came into office in January 2017. His immediate predecessor was John Dramani Mahama. 

Towards the end of that Mahama presidency, anxiety about illegal mining in Ghana rose to a fever pitch among the chattering classes. 

Enabled by digital means, videos and pictures of polluted and discoloured water bodies gained mass distribution among the routed, long-suffering and dislocated populace. These recordings warned about an imminent environmental apocalypse, if urgent action was not taken. 

Mahama seemed paralysed in the face of these environmental challenges and man-made ecological breakdowns, while in office. 

It is reasonable to say that his presidency was considerably delegitimised by this saga, what Ghanaians call galamsey. 

There may have been other reasons and factors at play, but the matter of illegal mining definitely played a role; John Mahama lost the presidential elections of 2016, ditched in a heap by voters who expected better from leaders. 

Bristling with seeming confidence, the then new president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, eloquently and forcefully staked his presidency – in full view of the national media and public – on solving the vexing problem of illegal mining. 

It was a new day of hope, or so it seemed. He was not the first prophet on this, and, it was hoped, he would not be the last. The goose of galamseyers was about to be cooked, there was a new Sheriff in town.

We have made insufficient progress on galamsey

That was, now, almost eight long years ago. The vigorous and seemingly courageous presidential declarations made then can now be assessed against reality, for impact and achievement. 

There was an inter-ministerial committee set up, some incursions by the armed forces in selected forests, and then nothing. 

The leader, the regime, the state, and the society; united in fatigue and exhaustion, seemed to dump the matter in a huff. What then ensued has been clothed in incomprehensible vagueness and opacity. 

The man who staked his presidency, against the reality and record of actual actions and achievements in ending galamsey, stands revealed on this matter - to borrow an infuriated Karl Marx’s castigation of his persistent disputant,  Mikhail Bakunin - as “a Mohammed, without a Koran!” 

The loud proclamation of determination to solve the problem of illegal mining, seems to have been rested atop the tall pile of “miracles that led nowhere!” 

The empty midnight prophecy of a political Shaman, a marabout, a charlatan prophet. For much of the Akufo-Addo era, save the initial theatrics, on illegal mining, his has seemed like a presidency-in-absentia.

The state remains aloof, paralysed, inert, helpless, incompetent, unwilling, hesitant, incapable, shaky and indifferent, as this existential threat has spread like a malignant cancer across the body of life that is our society. 

Illegal mining, galamsey, is an existential risk to Ghana, that should now be obvious to all. Seldom has there been an issue that runs across so many fault-lines simultaneously, with such dire ramifications and consequences. 

Like a cancer that is not treated after early detection, the effects and impacts of unchecked and wilfully uncontrollable illegal mining have had very devastating impacts and consequences. The situation will get worse, unless there are serious science-based and sociologically insightful interventions. 

The consequences are dire

On this one issue hangs the massive destruction and despoilation of our forests, water bodies, other forms of vegetative cover, and more. 

The very air we breathe and survive on is in danger too. Humans in the upper socio-economic echelons of society may move to bottled water and other treated forms, at great cost, but what then happens to flora and fauna, we just watch them die? With all the dangerous implications of such an eventuality? 

What about the majority that cannot afford such options, are they expected to sit peacefully and just go extinct? We have cast the bread of all our shortcomings and contradictions upon the waters, no surprise, the waters are now striking back – poisoned! 

If we are permitted to remember the maestro of reggae music, Robert Nesta Marley, when this rain of disaster falls, it will not fall on one man’s housetop.

Illegal mining threatens food supply because it disrupts agriculture on several fronts; land availability, loss of labour, lack of safe water, general insecurity, and more. 

Illegal mining, galamsey, exacerbates the existing chaos that is our land management regime, escalating tensions in community after community, to explosive levels. 

The many positive concerns and opportunities of subject areas that have come to be known collectively as Sustainability, Circular Economics, Economics of Mutuality, and such others, are inexplicably ignored by those who seek to cut corners with illegal mining. 

In the chase for mammon, bloody profits from illegal gold mining that is, in this case , nothing is sacred, the earth itself is being destroyed. 

It is almost unbelievable, yet true, that some studies estimate that ten percent of the Ghanaian population now depend on illegal mining for economic sustenance. 

This is how out of control the cancer has become.

There are major but very dangerous resultants of all of this in the calculus of political economy. The illicit fund flows from these activities are neither traced nor taxed. 

The streams of such illicit fund flows seem to end up in places that corrode the ethical and values base of political parties, as well as some major institutions of governance in our beleaguered Santa Claus democracy. 

Narco-states of Latin America in times past offer a ready-made template of what can happen next, if it has not already happened that is. 

The dreaded and menacing Robinson Crusoe Society is at hand in Ghana. Law and order itself seems to be in abeyance; the competence of the state thoroughly corroded, as we fail to implement immigration regulations, mining rights and permits granting processes, national security protocols, land law, employment regulations, and more. Whole communities and their traditional leaders watch in suspended animation. 

Sometimes, indeed participate, as, farms are mowed down in plain sight. In some highly distressing cases schools and other community facilities are torn down, and heavy earth-moving equipment are clandestinely (to the eyes of the inept and incompetent state) moved about. 

There are now cries from industry that clean water for their processes has become a hard-to-get commodity; is Ghana heading towards importation of water too? 

It is in the nature of things that water-bodies are not respecters of the borders drawn up for Africa in Berlin; the polluted effluent flows across these boundaries easily into neighbouring countries. 

For these neighbours, that is the cost to bear of harbouring an irresponsible and incompetent state in your backyard. How much longer before this blows up into another of the already too many sub-regional conflicts in West Africa?

We are all in this together or none of us has a chance

There was once, in this very country Ghana, preceded by an exploitative colonial construct called Gold Coast, a thriving and organic habitation of civilised people. 

Then came what was supposed to be called development, and this is where we have landed with it. 

Development, to use that apt phrasing of Professor Andre Gunder-Frank, has turned into the development of under-development, in our incapable hands. 

Our forebears, perceived to be illiterate, did much better.

We once had clear, thriving fresh water bodies, veritable symbols of an idyllic, harmonious and organic existence. 

We cherished nature, in some places even worshipped it as evidence of the supernatural. We are the people who invoked mother earth as Asaase Yaa. 

We honoured the waters of the earth as we do the almighty with the appellation, Totrobonsu. Yet, today, illegal mining has rendered all that a distant and nearly impossible dream. 

Alas, a memory from the past that only serves as an often ignored reminder of just how far we have deteriorated as a society. 

We have become now accustomed to very discoloured and thoroughly polluted streams, lagoons, rivers and ponds. 

They stand as emblems of shame to a stricken Republic and its disillusioned people. It is not clear whether we are citizens or subjects of this republic. 

Everywhere in our cities, the concrete jungle encroaches on green spaces. Basic sanitation is not a source of pride for us; the pledge to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa, another example of Akufo-Addo being a Mohammed without a Koran. 

The impotent leadership of the state, sits aloof, in a stupor of gross ineptitude in the care and stewardship of our environment. 

Another sign that both sides of the partisan divide in the duopoly that is this Santa Claus Democracy are fixated on winning power, sometimes, simplistically for its own sake.  

Only that. Simply that. Ultimately that. Nothing bothers them enough to focus on genuinely improving livelihoods of the masses of our people, condemned to live in misery. 

The imminent death of a putrefying society, to them, a minor matter subordinate to their great parochial chase for power. 

It is power that gives access to booty and largesse, the real and only objects of lustful desire for the political class in a Santa Claus democracy. 

The welfare of society is just an adopted ruse, a con, a hoax; something said to win an election. No more. 

The relationship between voters, citizens of the land, and the political class in a Santa Claus democracy, has decayed into something similar to that between a man and a prostitute - transactional and exploitative at best, injurious and debilitating at worst. Deadly, ultimately.

What are the priorities of national security in such a construct? The post-colonial state of the elites, one that has never really cared about peasants and marginalised workers in this Fourth Republic, suddenly expects them to care about the future of a state in which they have no stake? How is that even possible? 

People who have no real expectation of a tomorrow of hope, are usually unlikely to be interested in sacrificing anything today, for that hopeless tomorrow. 

If the hydra-headed illegal mining problem has become a juggernaut, the catafalque on which the coffin of many communities will be placed when they die – as they will at this rate, it is because we have allowed it to become so, by doing precious little about it, up to now at least. 

To watch the recent retrieval of the corpses of little children, trapped to a wretched death in an illegal mine that cares nothing for public safety standards, was simply devastating and tragic. 

Little children at play one moment, wrapped in the stench, waste, mockery and indifferent stiffness of avoidable and accidental death in the next, at such a young age. 

This must be the final clarion call for all conscious citizens:  the time has come for an all-inclusive conversation about what to do going forward. 

It will require a widely consultative and multi-stakeholder approach. And of course, government and its leaders must convene it. 

They are, or should be, there only to ensure the welfare of citizens and to secure the long term health of society; nothing else really. 

If they cannot deliver on this, they must be got rid-off, by any legal means necessary.

Make no mistake about it, illegal mining is now a very dangerous and complex problem. Too many micro-economies depend on it, way too many. 

We have created a situation in which whole towns can collapse economically, if it is ended without proper planning and careful inclusive strategising. 

Yet, if we do not address it now, all our towns will go down in the long term.

In search of solutions - Rectify the structural thought defect 

To address illegal mining meaningfully, is to tackle all the things that make our state incompetent, and to seriously address the developmental challenges of inequality and mass misery. 

It was not always this bad, and there are many countries with gold that manage it better. We Ghanaians are not the children of a lesser God, we the Ghanaian people must stand up and fix this mess. 

Unless citizens in the communities themselves, as well as the many faceless actors (latent big men who are non-perpetrating beneficiaries)  are brought together to search for solutions, there will be no enduring success. 

To try to use blunt force to stop illegal mining, is to sentence people to lives of even more deprivation and misery than they experience today. 

That will betray a shocking poverty of understanding of the political, sociological and economic factors that have created the mess in the first place. 

These are dreadful realities that must be faced. To put it as forcefully and bluntly as is possible, the existence of galamsey, is a consequence of failed leadership and an incompetent state. 

An elite, inoculated and immunised by hubris and complacency, somehow manages to convince itself, that it will be possible to shield the big fish behind this illegal trade forever, while occasionally rounding up petty actors. 

This is an illusion. The mantle of impunity will one day be torn apart. If decisive action is not taken now, one day soon it will explode; the turf of illegal mining is riven with simply too many conflicts. 

Arms, sophisticated ammunition, are dangerously involved, a ticking time-bomb almost at the end of its tether, as leadership fiddles.

Many in the neoliberal orbit persuade themselves that the writings of the moral philosopher, Adam Smith – particularly his “invisible hand”, validate their strange stance that the hollowing out of the state is right. 

Our local epigones of Western neoliberal clerics are famed for their not so thoroughly thought through epigrams: “the business of government is government, not business,” being one well known but strange articulation in this vein. 

These epigones do not then say what government is, and do not – sadly – realise that it is a considerable misunderstanding of Smith’s “invisible hand”. 

It is a misunderstanding, a misconstrued dilemma, only because many of such types have heard about Adam Smith, but they have never seriously studied or really understood his works. 

Not in their full context at least. Smith had tremendous confidence in the role of competent regulators and states, invested with agency to ensure equilibrium existed between states, markets and societies. 

Fairness for Smith was attained through the lenses of “the impartial spectator.” To strip the state of its capacity and competence was never what Adam Smith advocated. 

He did not feign any ignorance and pretend that a perfectly self-governing  free market was possible, ideal, or desirable. That is plain magical thinking.

By collapsing the competence of the state, as we have in this fondness of neoliberalism by our policy makers, we are now faced with the situation the renowned philosopher, Professor Isaiah Berlin, spoke to so eloquently in his book, “The Crooked Timber of Humanity”: “Freedom for the wolves most often means death to the sheep.” 

The scourge of illegal mining is subjecting Ghana to death by a thousand cuts. Those intoxicated by predatory profiteering seek domination by a few, through wealth for a few, and by any means necessary. 

It has similarities with the processes that detonated, those many years back, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And those that led to that infamous conference in Berlin. 

At the residence of Otto von Bismarck, to divvy up Africa for crude colonial exploitation and extraction. The bourgeoisie remain the same everywhere – from shore to shore; greedy, predatory, selfish. 

As Sartre pointed out, in his riveting foreword to “The Wretched of The Earth,”  Fanon’s unflinching denunciation of colonial oppression,  the bourgeoisie are, as opportunistic go-betweens, “sham from beginning to end.”  

The wolves of galamsey are visiting death, this time on those they regard as sheep; the earth, and all its resources (that includes human society).

We cannot let Achimota forest also become a concrete jungle

As though this is not bad enough, the political elites – across the divide – have also recently announced that Achimota Forest, one of the last green spaces at scale in our capital city, Accra, the lungs of the city so to speak, will soon pass into private hands. 

Perhaps to be displaced by more and more concrete, in the never ending Boorish and Philistine existence we now style as modernisation in Ghana. 

As far back as 1930, almost five hundred hectares of forest, maintained as a green buffer for the city, even by the colonialists, is now on the butcher’s table too. 

An object of desire for, sometime now, by the politically powerful, the rapacious lust for this virgin green space is now being publicly expressed. 

And as we have come to expect, beyond perfunctory gestures, the entire political class is engaged in a solidarity of silence and minimum protest. 

The wheels of mindless privatisation - that deceitful elixir of intellectually lazy neoliberals - of another of our common goods proceeds, willy nilly. 

All protests from the people ignored. The loud presidential professing of concerns for keeping our environment sane, safe, wholesome and sustainable, at high profile conferences and events, for the generations that will come next, just further empty talk. 

More examples of politicians intent on grabbing whatever is in their reach, by saying whatever it takes. Have we become the people who will eat even their children to enjoy a tasty meal and do banquet?

This is indeed a dire set of circumstances, a matter so complex and difficult to deal with that the temptation to just sit and wait for our deaths in despair, shrouded in ennui, is great. 

For galamsey – let no one be in any doubt – can be the end of us. It is in such bizarre circumstances, that good old Jimmy Baldwin, writing in strident and immortal encouragement in 1962, in  “The New York Times Book Review,”  in an article felicitously and appropriately titled,  “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” as only he could, observed with conviction that: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

Until the last trumpet sounds

The politicians have no track record of seriousness on  this matter. If the citizens do not significantly step up the pressure on them, nothing meaningful will happen to end the destruction that is illegal mining in Ghana. 

Until it is too late, and it is not much longer when it will be too late, if we do nothing now, that is. 

Our forebears, in their characteristic sagacity, before we came along with our mindless and destructive short-termism, always remarked that, no matter how hot your anger is, it cannot cook yams. 

We must organise and increase the temperature on this matter to demand real action. And now.

The Akufo-Addo era is now almost at an end. It has been what it has been. It does not appear reasonable to expect that on the eve of its end, it will suddenly change for the better on this matter. Or on anything else, for that matter. 

What is infinitely disturbing therefore, is that those who seek to succeed him have treated the matter of illegal mining relatively lightly  At least up to now. 

The media is complicit in not probing hard enough, but we all have a responsibility to make galamsey the defining issue of this election. 

Neither the manifestos they have issued, with ritual pomp and pageantry, nor their own pronouncements, point to original thinking and determination, that suggest a commitment to making the difficult decisions and pursuing the far-reaching interventions required. 

If illegal mining, galamsey, and the devastating ecological destruction that is its consequence are to end, this hapless orientation by political leaders must change. 

Or else they must be changed. Bland proclamations of 24-hour economies and self-declarations by candidates as helpless mates of the powerful, are nowhere near satisfactory.

We are faced with an existential risk. If we continue to just drift as we have done in the last twelve years, then the country and society many of us call our only true home, could be stripped of any pretence to a healthy and organic existence, within the next decade. 

It is time for all with any kind of voice in our society, to stand up and be counted on this matter. We owe this to coming generations. 

Organised labour, the media, religious bodies, professional associations, the arts and the sciences, academia, even for a change – hopefully – the chiefs and family heads, and all other elements of society, must weigh in on this matter. 

It is that important that we reverse this disastrous trend of widespread ecological damage, for, left unchecked, it can spell the very end of Ghanaian history.  

The next President of Ghana must only be elected, it would be good to establish as defining criteria, because (s)he has a credible plan and a solid commitment to end this blight on our collective well-being. Or else, what really is the point of the elections to be held in a few months’ time?

This is an urgent matter for us all to raise. Aime Cesaire reminds us all,  in “Et les Chiens se Taisent”  (And The Dogs Were Silent), that we should say with meaning: “in the whole world, no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.” Now is the moment to act. A luta continua.