A research fellow at IMANI Africa, is advocating for the formalisation of illegal mining popularly known as ‘galamsey’ across the country.
The call by Frank Boateng, follows the renewed fight against the menace by Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor.
Speaking to the media, Mr Boateng averred government must re-assess the sector and formalise its activities.
“Let’s not think that illegal mining is so bad because it has its positives and it is also serving some very good purpose in terms of the local economies and the number of people that are being fed through the galamsey employment engine,” he said.
“It’s a chain, I mean the linkages are so much and to me we really need to look into this sector and get it formalised so that we can have people work and work sustainably,” he added.
According to the research fellow with IMANI Africa, the major cause of influx of foreigners into illegal mining is due to lack of access to finance by indigenes.
“If we really talk about foreigners in illegal mining, we only point to the Chinese, and you can’t go beyond them, so it is a question of do our youth have the right financing support to help them get onto the mine and operate themselves? They don’t,” he stated.
“And even if they do, it is not big enough to put them into the scale they intend to operate, so they resort to the Chinese financiers who come in and sometimes they just takeover the land and say we want to operate and then give you a percentage at the end of the day,” he posited.
Speaking further, he stated that some Ghs 2.3 billion lost through illegal mining in 2016 alone, must serve as a wake-up call for government to pay attention to the sector beyond the destruction of the environment.
Mr Boateng believes formalising galamsey would help rake in more revenue for government and also help control the excessive pollution of the environment.
