Former Lands and Natural Resources Minister Inusah Fuseini has described the inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) under the first tenure of the Akufo-Addo administration as a failure.

According to him, due to the failure of the committee, its chairman and former Minister Professor Frimpong Boateng was not invited to the ongoing National Consultative Dialogue on Small Scale Mining

“The interministerial committee was a total failure. The chairman of the committee was not even invited to share his expertise at the forum which is ongoing. The President knowing it was a failure does not want to be associated with it that’s why a new platform is being created to deal with the situation,” he told Francis Abban on Morning Starr.

“The use of the military isn’t the be-all and end-all because they are human beings and can be compromised,” he noted.

Meanwhile, the President of the Ghana Journalist Association (GJA) has said the ongoing National Consultative Forum on small scale Mining in Accra is an indication that the momentum in fighting the social canker failed.

“The fight against galamsey is achievable given what we saw in the past. The dialogue is an open admission that we were doing well but we failed the momentum so there’s the need to be more tenacious,” he told Starr FM.

The National Consultative Dialogue on Small Scale Mining, which will end today, April 15, 2021, is expected to come out with a communiqué on the solution to the illegal mining menace.

The forum has been a two-day roundtable discussion on challenges confronting the small-scale mining sector.

It has had inputs from key mining experts, the Small-Scale Mining Association, the Coalition of Civil Society Against Illegal Small-Scale Mining, among others.