Legal practitioner and host of Joy FM’s Newsfile, Samson Lardy Anyenini, has urged the Mahama administration to adopt the anti-galamsey blueprint proposed by former Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.
As part of his policies during the 2024 presidential campaign, Dr. Bawumia outlined a mining strategy aimed at tackling the galamsey menace and promoting safe mining practices.
Discussing illegal mining on Newsfile on Saturday, Anyenini referenced Bawumia’s proposal and emphasized its relevance.
“I kept saying that the Mahama administration should look at Dr. Bawumia’s blueprint for galamsey, and some people didn’t understand me,” he said.
“They should go in there and look at what exists, including creating a common pool of facilities to help the miners because they can’t afford—small-scale miners—so you regulate them properly.”
Bawumia’s Mining Policy
Dr. Bawumia’s mining plan, widely seen as a practicable solution, focused on environmental protection, sustainable growth, and local development.
Key elements of his blueprint included:
Promoting mercury-free gold catcher machines for eco-friendly mining.
Reforming fiscal policies to incentivize exploration.
Expanding the Bank of Ghana’s Gold Purchase Programme to include small-scale miners.
Creating value chains for minerals like aluminum, lithium, and salt to foster job creation.
Reclaiming mined lands for farming.
Allocating affordable power to mineral-based industries and mitigating illegal mining’s impact on cocoa-growing areas.
Strengthening local content policies, supporting small-scale miners, and establishing gold refineries.
Implementing traceability systems to promote transparency and regional involvement.
Establishing a minerals development bank to provide funding for small-scale miners, similar to how ADB Bank supports farmers.
Developing critical infrastructure such as new railway lines to reduce transport costs and enhance Ghana’s mining sector.
Dr. Bawumia argued that these measures would make Ghana a sustainable and prosperous mining hub.
Meanwhile, legal and policy analyst Kofi Bentil, who also appeared on Newsfile, cautioned President Mahama against underestimating the complexities of illegal mining.
“Gold is a spirit, and from time immemorial, it makes men mad. If you know the stories of the Wild West, people killed and died for gold. So when you see people risking their lives to go after this, and we think that we can just treat it as a simple law enforcement issue, that’s where the problem is,” he said.
Bentil stressed that tackling galamsey requires more than law enforcement and called for comprehensive policies to address the root causes of the problem.
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