Professor Godfred Bokpin, a finance and economics lecturer at the University of Ghana, has called for a nationwide review of President John Mahama’s fight against illegal mining, known locally as galamsey. Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, October 31, the economist warned that the government’s interventions appear inadequate compared with the environmental damage wrought by the practice.
Bokpin urged that the country assess whether it is meeting the targets and objectives set when Mahama took office, rather than measuring progress mainly by the number of arrests and equipment seized. “We need to ask ourselves: what were the clear targets we set for ourselves as a country when the new administration took over, in terms of how it wanted to respond to irresponsible mining?” he asked.
The professor questioned whether the fight is being evaluated mainly through arrests and the seizure of mining equipment such as changfans, instead of measurable progress toward ending illegal mining. “Are we looking at it just in terms of the number of arrests, changfans and all of that? What were the goals? What were the targets? What were the objectives? The milestones?” he said.
With Mahama having spent more than a year and a half in office, Bokpin said the time was right for a comprehensive national assessment of the government’s efforts. He said such a review would help determine whether the country is on track and whether the interventions introduced so far are sufficient to address the problem.
He further questioned whether the resources and efforts being deployed by the government match the scale of environmental destruction caused by illegal mining. “From that angle, for me, I will say that the intervention is far less in proportion to the scale of disaster we are dealing with,” he said.
The economist also suggested that the difficulty in mounting a stronger response could be linked to the role of state institutions and officials in the illegal mining problem. “This is only so because the State itself, my considered view, is that the State itself is complicit in this matter. The State may be playing a facilitating role in all of this,” he added.
Moving forward, Bokpin emphasized the need for a clear set of metrics to gauge the administration’s performance and to ensure that the fight against galamsey is aligned with the country’s environmental and economic objectives.
