On Abolition of Galamsey in an Election Year, Kofi Akpaloo Is Both Right and Wrong

Mr. Kofi Akpaloo is perfectly on target to observe that it is not strategically savvy for any government or president to attempt, rather foolhardily, to stanch the deleterious act of heinous criminality that is the Chinese-made Changfang-Excavator enhanced illegal small-scale mining infamously called Galamsey. More so, when a megalomaniacal and a politically determined twice-defeated, former one-term President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama continues to viciously, shamelessly and unconscionably make significant political capital out of this unarguably deadly practice that imminently threatens the very existence and the long-term survival of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and some 35-million Ghanaian citizens and residents (See “It's only a foolish president who will attempt to stop galamsey two months to an election – Kofi Akpaloo” Modernghana.com 10/1/24).

The Leader of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG), a ruling New Patriotic Party-allied minor political and ideological establishment, is smack on target with his observation because such an eleventh-hour and a vote-targeted approach to the stoppage or the abolition of Galamsey insults the intelligence of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry and the electorate. It also obviously feeds into the well-established narrative that neither of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress, is interested in seriously tackling the critical menace of Galamsey head-on.

In many ways, the preceding observation is not very far from accurate, even if the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC)-collapsing leadership of the National Democratic Congress has proven itself to be the relatively far less socially and politically responsible and even far less progressive of our two major political parties. The fact of the matter is that both the previous National Democratic Congress-sponsored Mahama regime and the present Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party-sponsored government have had ample opportunities to clamp down on and radically extirpate or root out the ecologically genocidal practice of Galamsey, but have been scandalously half-hearted in their respective approaches to definitively resolving this apocalyptic menace.

And while “relativity” or “relativism” does not quite cut it, as it were, nevertheless, it is the leadership of the twice, consecutively elected New Patriotic Party that has adequately demonstrated to Ghanaians that it has the urge and the flair to seriously and effectively tackle the Galamsey menace, given the right or the necessary set of circumstances, including the ability of the New Patriotic Party’s Communications Team’s operatives to poignantly and credibly convince the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and the electorate that the brazen and the unconscionable and the socially irresponsible leaders of the nauseatingly recycled Mahama-led National Democratic Congress have neither the interest nor the desire to facilitate the total and the radical eradication of the existentially genocidal and prohibitive practice of Galamsey.

Not quite a while ago, for example, the 2020 and the 2024 Vice-Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, while on an electioneering-campaign stumps of the Amenfi-North Constituency, in the Akufo-Addo-created Western-North Region, smugly and rather artlessly told the members of this Galamsey-damaged community that in the highly unlikely event of former President Mahama’s being returned to Jubilee House or the Presidency, the next NDC government had absolutely no intention whatsoever of putting the kibosh on the environmentally destructive activities of Galamsey but merely intended to teach Galamseyers or the practitioners of the illegal small-scale mining industry how to more “constructively” and “productively” continue practicing such wanton acts of criminality in a more acceptable manner or fashion.

Which, naturally, prompted some social media commentators to liken such patently unwise declaration by Candidate Opoku-Agyemang to scandalously imply that the national development policy agenda of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress curiously and unconscionably entailed making acts of insufferable criminality more acceptable to the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people. Even more significant, Candidate Opoku-Agyemang made it clear to the Ghanaian people that the much-touted Mahama-fangled 24-Hour Economy that was supposed to significantly upgrade Ghana’s economic standards to that of an Upper-Middle-Income nation was absolutely nothing short of the sort of slogan that many of the political opponents of the NDC and Mahama detractors have been telling all of us from day one that it incontrovertibly is.

To the foregoing effect, the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast informed her Amenfi-North audience that while the Elmina native, from the nearby Central Region, was convinced about the fact of the leadership of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party being woefully incapable of creating an adequate number of livable-wage jobs for the for the country’s teeming youths, she was equally convinced about the fact that a second Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ government would be even far less capable of creating economically sustainable jobs for the vast pool of Ghanaian youths who posed a national security problem for the country in the offing.

“There is absolutely no option for our youths but to studiously resort to doing Galamsey with a human or a more benign face,” the former Mahama-appointed Education Minister was widely reported to have declared. Now, where Kofi Akpaloo had it wrong with his argument has to do with the fact that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had at least three-and-half years, in the wake of the fiercely contested 2020 General Election to have instituted a Galamsey-eradicating policy initiative. And there is ample and readily accessible and verifiable evidence pointing to the fact that, indeed, such a laudable policy initiative existed both on paper and at least marginally in practice as well.

But for some not-so-curious reasons, the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice simply decided to throw all caution to the wind, as it were, by rather capriciously pursuing a nihilistic policy of political expediency, even while also paradoxically and significantly improving the living standards of a great majority of the Ghanaian people, with the prompt resuscitation of the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which a grossly politically incompetent former President Mahama thoroughly bankrupted; and then Nana Akufo-Addo’s implementation of the hitherto historically unprecedented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Vocational, Technical and STEM Education System, which a cynical President Mahama had contemptuously parried of as a practical impossibility that only existed in the hallucinogenic imagination of a megalomaniacal politician hellbent on grabbing power by hook or crook.

Which is all the more reason why the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters cannot go wrong by massively casting their ballots in favor of the widely presumed Next President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, popularly known as “Mr. Digital.”

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Oct. 8, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]