The state of illegal mining or galamsey has taken a perilous and unprecedented dimension.
Day-in-day-out stories about new features in the underground business emerge in both the traditional and social media…they clearly point at a losing war against the illegality if there is anything like a sincere war against it anyway.
State agents are no longer able to assert their authority in stopping the rape of water bodies and forest reserves.
It is beginning to appear more like a country inching towards a state of hopelessness on the part of government as daring illegal miners not only continue to engage in the illegality but calling the bluff of state agents deployed to ostensibly arrest the situation.
Last week social media showed a worrying scene of youth creating a barrier and ordering soldiers on anti-galamsey operations not to dare cross it. It was at Manso Mpatuam in the Ashanti Region where the soldiers were on official anti-galamsey duty.
Indeed the soldiers obeyed the orders of the youth and froze at their position.
A rod-like object served as the barrier with bare-chested persons obviously galamsey-hardened youth stood guard as it were.
Not that the soldiers could not take on the hoodlums but under the circumstances they were operating as good soldiers…. on orders beyond which they could not go.
To use the street parlance…who born dog? How dare they order infantrymen not to advance? When those in charge clearly spell out ‘don’t be too hard on them orders’ to security agents the outcome is what happened at Manso Mpatuam and being replicated elsewhere.
It is instructive and revealing that the foregone occurrence came on the heels of the Hwidiem incident where soldiers were held hostage by irate illegal miners.
Arrested suspected illegal miners at the Hwidiem Police Station had their handcuffs removed by the MP a case now under investigation.
It is intolerable when such acts of indiscipline start creeping up in our body-politics more so when the players draw their impunity from the corridors of power. The campaign season assurance to illegal miners that when power returns to the NDC galamseyers doing time in prison would be released and actors in the industry would be allowed to operate has palpably emboldened them.
We are creeping towards a state where security agents would start being wary about how much energy they can put in so-called anti-galamsey operations.
It can easily be recalled how seized excavators suspected to have been used in illegal mining were ordered released.
The Environmental Protection Authority mission to a galamsey area last week and the orders to them to call off the mission refers.
Illegal mining is now being directed by powerful cabals whose impunity knows no bounds.
Where there is galamsey there are firearms and caches of ammo recent empirical evidence has proven. Those who do not think we have reached the precipice as a nation must be living in a fool’s paradise.
