An advert for a fish-farming seminar in the Thursday June 11, 2009 edition of The Daily Graphic caught my eye – as I am constantly on the look-out for alternative income-generating opportunities that might benefit the young people of Akim Abuakwa Juaso, and help wean them off the illegal logging and illegal surface gold mining that is endangering one of Ghana’s only two evergreen uplands rain forests. I am particularly keen to ensure that that part of the Atiwa Range rain forest is preserved – and will even sacrifice my life, if necessary, to ensure that that is done. The same edition of The Daily Graphic also carried a news report that Mr. Abuga Pele had been appointed the acting national coordinator of the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) – and as someone who takes a great deal of interest in the younger generation, that too caught my eye. Being better-educated than my generation is, and mercifully totally “de-tribalised” they are the great hope for the future of our country, and will also serve as an example to the rest of Africa in harmonious multi-ethnic co-existence – as ethnic tensions gradually destroy the stability of key African nations such as Kenya, DR Congo, Sudan, and Nigeria..
The fish-farming seminar, which is apparently a private-sector Israeli-Ghanaian collaboration organized by a local consultancy firm, Silicon Consult, could very well serve as a model for the NYEP to work with private-sector entities to provide valuable skills for the teeming masses of young people one sees struggling daily to survive – selling various items to passengers in vehicles caught up in traffic jams in city streets and urban roads up and down our country. Many of them have drifted to cities across the country from the rural areas. For the obvious constraint of being financially-challenged, attending such private-sector seminars is out of the question for most young unemployed people. It might therefore be worthwhile for the NYEP to consider partnering the private-sector organisations that organize such life-changing seminars – in private-public-partnerships (PPP) to provide training in micro-entrepreneurship on a long-term basis for young people throughout Ghana. Such seminars ought to be held regularly throughout the country – and should be a key component of the development plan for the regions of the northern savannah belt.
Attending such seminars could literally transform the lives of tens of thousands of those young street vendors – who show their hard-working nature and sense of initiative, by being out on the streets hours on end daily, no matter what the weather is. As a society, we must harness their “can-do” spirit and make productive use of it, to help us increase the GDP of our country, at a time when the economies of virtually all our overseas trading partners have contracted. Mrs. Gladys Asmah, who was a fisheries minister in the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) regime, worked incredibly hard selling the idea of fish-farming to Ghanaian farmers and the general populace. The present regime can build on what she was able to achieve – by getting the NYEP to use the PPP model to provide street vendors and other unemployed young people with training in productive endeavours such as fish-farming. I would urge the new national coordinator of the NYEP, Mr. Abuga Pele, to make the organisation more proactive – and send its employees out unto the pavements to inform those young street vendors of the availability of such seminar opportunities.
The NYEP could also work with district assemblies and private-sector consultancy firms, such as Silicon Consult, which placed the advertisement for the fish-farming seminar that caught my eye – and which made me do some lateral thinking about how the NYEP could literally help millions of young people to become micro-entrepreneurs using the PPP model. Whiles in office, Mr. Abuga Pele should also do all he can to visit Bangladesh, to see the amazing work Dr. Yunis the Noble Laureate has done there, to transform the lives of millions of poor Bangladeshis – and invite him to visit Ghana to see how the NYEP could partner his multi-faceted Bramen organisation in Ghana to help empower millions of poor Ghanaian families. Perhaps through the NYEP Ghana could even eventually develop fish-farming by young people into a non-traditional export industry – and help our country to become a major exporter of African catfish to Asia: in parts of which it is said to be an expensive delicacy.
Nearer home, in their effort to protect the large private forest reserve they own on a freehold basis, and which is part of the Atiwa Range uplands evergreen rain forest, the owners of P.E. Thompson Farms & Commodity Exports Limited, who are all committed environmentalists, recently succeeded in halting the Akim Abuakwa Juaso operations of a surface gold mining company, Solar Mining – which was mining illegally in the foothills of that part of the Atiwa Range rain forest without a valid permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Solar Mining has apparently bought a vast swathe of farmland from cocoa farmers in that area - and is said by some of those associated with it to have permission to mine in a fifty-kilometer stretch from Anyinham to Asiakwa. How a surface mining gold mining company that is unknown to the EPA’s mining permit department can have a permit to operate in a fifty-kilometer stretch of the Atiwa Range rain forest from Anyinham to Asiakwa, is beyond my comprehension – but that is another story altogether: which I will save for another day.
The fish-farming idea might be a perfect opportunity for small-scale mining companies like Solar Mining to start diversifying away from surface gold mining, and profit from a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly commercial undertaking – and they could work with entities like Silicon Consult in such ventures. There is some synergy between their mining operations, which involves considerable digging of the earth, and the digging of large ponds for fish-farming that they could leverage. Speaking for myself, apart from looking forward to attending the seminar, I shall try and visit Mr. Abuga Pele’s organisation’s offices – to talk to him about the possibility of the NYEP working with the staff of the Rural Enterprises Project (REP), and the Fanteakwa District Assembly, to get Silicon Consult to train the members of the Akim Abuakwa Juaso Youth Association to become fish-farming micro-entrepreneurs. Fish-farming could be one more alternative income-generating activity that could help reduce the illegal logging and the illegal surface gold mining that unfortunately goes on in that part of the Atiwa Range rain forest.
I will certainly be glad to live long enough to see the day, when the relaxing sound of water gently lapping the walls of fish-ponds owned by young rural dwellers in areas once blighted by surface gold mining pits, will replace the cacophony of the incessant and peace-shattering sound emitted by the multiplicity of chainsaws, that are daily busy destroying that important rain forest. Sadly, the Forestry Service of the Forestry Commission, and the traditional authorities of Akim Abuakwa, both seem unable to halt the activities of the criminal syndicates carrying out illegal logging and illegal surface gold mining in parts of the Atiwa Range rain forest with such impunity. Their sternest critics even call them hypocrites and say that posterity will judge them harshly – for giving the world the false impression that they are champions of conservation and environmental activists without compare: when it appears that in reality they only pay lip service to fighting environmental degradation merely for the publicity it brings them. Whatever be the case, those of us at the sharp end, pray that as the implications of global warming begins to dawn on many more Ghanaians, staff of the Forestry Service and the traditional authorities in Akim Abuakwa, and elsewhere in that part of Ghana’s Eastern Region, will finally wake up to their responsibilities towards Kwaebibirim – and support the efforts of those private individuals in Akim Abuakwa Juaso who are actually working for sustainable rural development in that part of rural Ghana – and at considerable personal risk to ourselves too, if I may add. A word to the wise…
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