Watching the news during the week, “galamsey” news/pictures would simply not go away.
Two murders at Asawase, Kumasi, three days apart, of the chief of Kusasis in Ashanti on July 22, and July 25, 2025 of a friend of the chief notwithstanding, “galamsey” still remained centre stage of news as an existential threat to Ghana!
Not surprisingly, Dr (Med) Sylva Vortia wrote in a July 22, 2025 article titled Galamsey: Ghana’s slow-motion Chernobyl, stating:
We live in a country rich in wisdom ‒ filled with professors, doctors of books, and acclaimed scholars.
Yet, we are witnessing a tragedy so colossal, so shamefully preventable, that future generations may look back and ask, “What kind of people poisoned their own waters and destroyed their own land in full knowledge and silence?”
This is not a war. This is not a foreign invasion. This is “galamsey” ‒ and it is Ghana's slow-motion apocalypse.
Let us compare this disaster not with petty crimes, but with some of the worst environmental catastrophes in living memory.
Only then can we grasp the full weight of what is unfolding before us.
The Aral Sea disaster: Once a vast inland sea in Central Asia, the Aral Sea was drained by reckless irrigation projects. Entire communities were wiped off the map. Fish vanished. Water turned toxic.
Life around it became a slow, choking death. So, it is with our rivers.
The Ankobra, the Pra, the Offin, and even parts of the mighty Tano ‒ once lifelines for farmers/fishermen ‒ now flow with mercury, arsenic, and cyanide.
What happened in Central Asia is happening here, in Ghana. And we are the ones turning the taps.
Chernobyl: Chernobyl, USSR was a sudden (nuclear) catastrophe (in 1986). Galamsey is a slow one.
But the result is the same: land poisoned beyond safe use, water turned into death, and people trapped in the fallout of decisions they never made.
Our poisoned rivers are Ghana’s radioactive zones.
Pregnant women fetch from them. Children bathe in them. Farmers irrigate with them.
And we ‒ the educated, the privileged, the so-called enlightened - say very little and do nothing.
The Niger Delta: Like the oil pollution in Nigeria, galamsey is a crime of greed, corruption and abandonment. In both cases, the very communities sitting on untold wealth are condemned to poverty, disease and ruin.
We are turning fertile farmlands into moonscapes.
We are trading forests for scars and rivers for sludge ‒ all for ounces of gold that enrich a few and enslave the many.
The Amazon deforestation: In Brazil, illegal mining and deforestation are wiping out the lungs of the Earth.
In Ghana, we are doing the same to our own ecological soul - cutting down protected forests, destroying cocoa farms, and leaving behind deserts where lush vegetation once stood.
Nation of silent witnesses
What makes our situation even more tragic is that we are not ignorant.
We are not uneducated.
We have scientists, engineers, economists and environmentalists.
We have institutions.
Yet somehow, the destruction continues - not despite our education, but in its presence.
We have become a nation of knowers who do not act.
A country of talkers who do not act — a people who watch the house burn and ask, “Whose job is it to put out the fire?”
True cost
Galamsey is not just environmental destruction. It is economic suicide, a public health crisis, a threat to food security and a betrayal of future generations.
It is a wound that no government can bandage once deep enough.
Call to conscience: The time has come to say enough. Enough silence.
Enough excuses. Enough complicity.
We must rise — academics, traditional leaders, religious bodies, civil society, every Ghanaian with a conscience.
We must treat galamsey not as a political football, but as a national emergency, greater than any election or party manifesto.
Because if we do not stop this madness, we will not have a nation left to argue about.
Let this be our Chernobyl, but not our grave.
Let it be the moment we turned around.
Let it be the year we saved our rivers.
Let it be the generation that refused to poison its children’s future.
May our grandchildren one day say: "They were slow, but they woke up.”
My worst fear in life is if I'm unfortunate enough to live up to 70 years and my grandchild asks me, " if you knew about the dangers of “galamsey” all along what did you do about it"?
Before I stutter to find words, she may add, "Your generation messed us up pretty bad".
That's my worst fear in life and my strongest motivation to do whatever I can to stop the generational genocide.
Comments
In my article in September 2024 titled Self-destruct button pressed? I stated as follows:
The UN Secretary-General stated that, “The six years since the Paris Climate Agreement (COP-25) have been the hottest on record.
Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice - either we stop it, or it stops us.
Enough of brutalising biodiversity, killing ourselves with carbon, treating nature like a toilet, burning, drilling and mining our earth deeper.
We are digging our own graves!”
In recent times, environmentalists have sounded alarm bells about destroying Nature’s biologically diverse ecosystem of the Atiwa Forest, a veritable source of drinking water for Ghana, just to allow foreigners to mine manganese.
Are we deliberately pressing the self-destruct button for our current gain at the expense of future generations who have to import drinking water?
Are we proving UNSG Antonio Guterres right that, “we are digging our own graves?”
Antonio Guterres’ words “we are digging our own graves “may have been directed at the world’s leading polluters, the developed world.
In Ghana, however, “galamsey” and its attendant cross-cutting evils like depleting our forests, poisoning of both surface and underground water, and children dropping out of school into armed robbery and prostitution, amount to “digging our own graves.”
If we allow it as DRC has, foreigners will help us “dig our own graves.”
Discussion
On Tuesday night of September 3, 2024, an MP fired at his opponents saying, “You have polluted the water more than us!” Telling the MPs they knew those involved in galamsey, the Speaker stated, “Desist from galamsey!” But, is that all?
Commenting on the damage to our environment, Founding Director of the Environmental and Sanitation Studies of the University of Ghana, Professor Chris Gordon, said the damage done to the environment cannot be restored in his lifetime. He added that “we have mortgaged the future of our children”.
For his part, Professor Kwasi Aning of the KAIPTC stated that galamsey has assumed trans-national proportions with Chinese, Nigeriens, Burkinabes, Nigerians, Malians and their overseas backers all actively destroying Ghana’s environment.
During the week, the 2019 clip of the Chinese Ambassador’s questions was played many times.
He asked: Who gives Chinese visas to come to Ghana?
When they arrive at the Accra International Airport, how do they get to the galamsey sites?
How come the Chinese do not go to South Africa which has more gold than Ghana to do galamsey?
Answering it himself, he said it is because SA citizens will not allow it.
We embrace it! Additionally, how do the heavy equipment move from the port to the mining areas?
Summary
In the words of anti-galamsey crusader journalist Erastus Asare Donkor, galamsey is the result of failed leadership.
“Galamsey” is a national disgrace! Galamsey is a dishonourable legacy!
Have we become an “Esau-Republic” selling our birthright/existence to foreigners for diseases/extinction? How low we have sunk!
Dr (Med) Vortia’s article, which likens deliberate “galamsey” to the accidental nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, USSR in 1986 is the latest wake-up call to all Ghanaians, particularly government and the greedy financiers.
Has the self-destruct button been pressed? Remember UN Secretary-General Guterres’ warning on environmental degradation saying, “we are digging our own graves! Either we stop it, or it stops us!”
Leadership, lead by example/Integrity! Fellow Ghanaians, wake up!
The writer is a former CEO, African Peace Support Trainers Association, Nairobi, Kenya; Council Chairman, Family Health University, Teshie, Accra
E-mail: dkfrimpong@yahoo.com
