Laws are not enough to fight illegal mining – Researcher claims

Doctoral researcher at Ruhr-Universität, Bochum-Germany and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CEBSAR-Africa, Albert Kobina-Mensah, has drawn a conclusion, per his observation, why Ghana has not been able to end illegal mining.

Speaking on the topic ‘Burning of excavators: The law and the way forward’ with Samuel Eshun on eTV Ghana’s Fact Sheet, he commented that a lot of actions have been taken and a lot of laws have been enacted over the past years but, all these have failed to stop the miners from engaging in the illegality because the root cause of the issue at hand has not been dealt with.

He said, “Between 1980 and 2020, we’re talking about not less than thirty mining laws, thirty mining acts, thirty mining regulations that have been enacted to deal with the mining sector but out of these over thirty mining regulations, like the PNDC law 217 which has to do with the use of mercury, PNDC law 218 that deals with the registration of small-scale mining and who qualifies among others, but all these have failed to deal with the problem because the miners always find ways around it’.

He continued that the government has tried confiscating equipment, employing military intervention, placing of a ban on small-scale mining and many other methods but the miners always find ways to go through with their illegality regardless.

Albert mentioned that the government even instituted the Inter-Ministerial Committee of Illegal Mining which could have done better at fighting the act, however, the problem, according to him, is that “in the first place, the institution of the Inter-Ministerial Committee of Illegal Mining was not backed by law”.

He noted that if the government is able to figure out the root cause of this problem and deal with that, then the issue of galamsey in Ghana can be checked.