Publish names of all those who have imported excavators into Ghana - Chamber of Mines

The Ghana Chamber of Mines has called on the Ministry of Transport to publish the names of all the importers of earthmoving equipment such as galamsey iinto Ghana to help lift the veil behind the faces supporting the environmental destruction currently being witnessed in the country.

“I can speak on the fact that even for us large scale miners, our members who had to bring in equipment they had imported into the system had to go through the Ministry of Lands to the Ministry of Transport, and the Commissioner General of the GRA would also have to endorse before you’re allowed to bring in the equipment,” he explained.

“These excavators, and the large scale mining excavators are not like the size of the excavators that are used in destroying our lands and all of that, so we would have to be able to publish the names of the people importing these excavators into this country. There are some of them, the reason why they’re importing these equipment into the country especially the small excavators is because of the galamsey.

“What I recommend that we do is we quickly need to publish the names of all of those people who imported those excavators in, because there is no road they’re going to contract; they don’t have any mining concession they’re going to deal with they’re not contractors. They will not be able to tell you who they were going to give it to,” Ing. Dr. Ashigbe explained.

He revealed that the strategy of illegal miners is to destroy their operational areas so quick in order to be able to recoup their investment before they are arrested, adding that these equipment have now become weapons of mass destruction.

“The strategy for a lot of these illegal miners is that the excavators cost them 200,000 dollars so when they get into a place they start destroying so quickly by the time you come and take it away from them they’ve been able to recoup their investment. So these excavators have become weapons of mass destructions,” he added.

Dr. Ashigbe revealed that one of the reasons for their call for the declaration of the state of emergency was to help end the massive destructions being orchestrated by these excavators.

“When some of us asked for the state of emergency to happen, these were some of the reasons. So under a state of emergency, the President could immediately say that all excavators that cannot demonstrate that they were coming for some road works or they’re coming for some legitimate mining we can confiscate d to the State to be used for some critical works. May be we should export these excavators to other countries and use the revenue as seed capital for governmental organizations mandated to fight galamsey,” Dr. Ashigbe added.