Flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has stressed the need for small-scale scale-mining activities in the country to be sanitised and regulated as part of efforts to deal with the illegal mining menace popularly known as galamsey and also conserve the environment.
In a video shared by GH One TV on their X page on Tuesday, September 17, 2024,
he expressed worry over the unregulated activities of small-scale miners, noting the absence of data gathering their operations.
“We are trying to chase people, but we are not trying to prevent it from happening in the first place. It is time, one needs to look at the whole regime of small-scale mining and sanitise the regime, regularise the regime, enforce the law and make sure that the Geological Survey Authority of Ghana does all the mapping for where all the gold reserves are. There is no data backing it. People are doing trial and error, destroying the environment wherever they go. They just go and dig; they don’t find it. Then they go to the next place, and they start digging; they don’t find, they go to the next place,” he explained.
He stressed the need for creating a more organised and regulated system for small-scale mining.
“I want us to set up community mining schemes with certainty from the Geological Survey Department that here you have gold in that place, we can make sure where they are mining has gold. We direct them to areas and do responsible mining and sustainable mining. If you don’t regulate them, they will hide and do it. We need to enforce the laws, direct, so that we can monitor what they are doing.
Once they go here and know that you get gold, all of them come with their Ghana Cards. we monitor you and provide you with user facilities . Then there is no need to go elsewhere and destroy the environment,” he noted.
