Thursday 22 June 2023

How can we make galamsay a criminal activity tantamount to signing one's own death warrant?

How can we make galamsay a criminal activity tantamount to signing one's own death warrant? Egregious iIllegal activities in Ghana's mining sector, occur, because of failure on the part of Ghanaian officialdom, to end impunity, accompanying mining sector illegality.
 

That illegal gold mining (galamsay) has enriched a powerful and well-connected few, in our homeland Ghana, at the expense of ordinary Ghanaians, and at great cost to society, is beyond doubt.

There is no question, too, that the resultant destruction of vast acreages of land in Ghana's priceless forest reserves, by gold miners (ecocidal-criminality that runs through the gamut of both legally registered and illegal mining entities), would never have reached current levels, had regulatory-failure not occurred.

Regulatory failure, results from the unparalleled greed, and lack of moral compasses,  that  have made corrupting key officials of  all the  regulatory  bodies that issue permits and licenses to mining sector entities, a  path to personal enrichment for public officials employed to ensure compliance by sector players  of all the rules, regulations and laws governing operational activities in the mining sector.

In light of  that, the Special Prosecutor's galamsay corruption investigations will yield unprecedented dividends, if he demands that all the key officials in the mining sector regulatory bodies  who sanction permits and licenses for gold prospecting and mining for both small and large scale entities,  should declare their assets, and those of their spouses, to the Office of the Special Prosecutor, within a week.

They are the betrayors-supreme, whose greed and lack of moral compasses,  power the ecocide gradually destroying our biodiversity  hotspots, the invaluable  ecosystem services of which, our longterm survival, and quality of life, depend on, oooo, Ghanafuor. Yoooooooo...

That said, clearly, to successfully root out mining sector illegalities, we must endeavour to remove the human factor, from the last-mile-end of the fight against galamsay, nationwide, as much as is practicable.

In that regard, we must treat the fight against galamsay as a national emergency, and put it on a war footing, and deploy killer-drones with night-vision capabilities that use AI to search, locate and destroy targets across the length and breadth of our country.

Nothing else will do if we are the effectively protect the remainder of our priceless natural capital - now even more valuable than all the minerals underneath our forest reserves combined, at a time of climate change.

To do so, we must put an end to  night-cover-galamsay operations pronto, by the usage of killer drones  -  which will quickly make venturing out at night to engage in galamsay, to be regarded by sundry criminal types, across Ghana,  as  tantamount to signing one's own death warrant. Enough, really, is enough.  Case closed.

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