How John Owusu paid for a nation's negligence
After birth comes death, but the pain that greets unavoidable deaths are often excruciatingly unbearable. This was the fate of the late John Owusu, the Director of Communications at AngloGold Ashanti (AGA), on February 7, 2016.
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Although his employers are yet to give an official account of the incident, information available indicates that John, also a veteran journalist who worked with The Ghanaian Times, was ran over by a vehicle used by the a Rapid Response Team of AGA, of which he was a member. They were said to be on a mission to assess the damage caused by illegal miners to the company's Obuasi Mine in the Ashanti Region.
The operation was one of similar ones undertaken by the company to flush out illegal gold miners, popularly called ‘galamsey’, from a mine that is now under ‘care and maintenance’.
While we join the dozens of people nationwide to pay tribute to the memory of a man who had served his country and employer very well but died tragically, th
It is clear that he has paid dearly for a menace that typifies the country’s inability to enforce law and order to the letter, especially when it comes to galamsey.
Over the years, almost all Ghanaians have agreed that the unlicensed mining of mineral resources by people with little expertise just to satisfy their selfish interests has adverse effects on the environment, legitimate businesses, lives and property. This incidence only goes to validate this conclusion.
Sadly, however, little has been done to proactively curtail the menace from blossoming from a community problem to a national disaster now requiring some heavy-handedness from the state apparatus.
Although the government has, in the past, responded with various measures, including the formation of an anti-galamsey task force, the passage of a law criminalising galamsey and the arrest and prosecution of perpetrators, the act still continues, with many mining companies now falling victim.
The latest policy initiative aimed at curbing the menace is the introduction of the 10 per cent withholding tax on every unprocessed mineral purchased in the country.
Given that these illegal miners sell their bounties unprocessed, it is expected that the new tax, contained in the Income Tax Act, 2015 (Act 896), would help the government to share a part of their pie as it struggles to curtail the practice.
Much as the move is welcoming, GRAPHIC BUSINESS wants to emphasis that the fight against galamsey deserves more attention than it is currently receiving.
And while that goes on, let us be reminded that although galamsey mostly threatens the lives of those engaged in it, watching it escalate any further would mean that we are endangering our own lives and the next victim could be very close to you - or we dare say, it could be you.