Death Of Ayensu River: Mourning The Mourning Of Professor Kwesi Yankah

Did I hear Professor Kwesi Yankah weeping in public and mourning the death of River Ayensu?

Did I hear Professor Kwesi Yankah confess that when he was witnessing the funerals of, Pra, Densu, Ankobra; he never believed that the icy hands of galamsey’s ecocide brigade would snuff the life out of River Ayensu?

He is alive to see the death of his beloved Ayensu River and is weeping uncontrollably in public to make some of us also throw away the “barima ensu” to wit “man does not cry” musk, and wailing “maa maa maa”?

Growing up in Burma Camp in the 1980s, I was a boy enthralled by words that danced like fireflies across the Saturday Mirror. There, amid the rustle of pages under my favourite mango tree's dappled shade, Professor Kwesi Yankah's "Woes of a Kwatriot" unfurled like a rebel's manifesto - sharp, satirical, alive with the pulse of a nation teetering on the edge of its own contradictions.

I read those articles with too much energy and attention etching into my young soul the alchemy of turning outrage into ink. Those articles weren't just read; they were devoured, fueling a quiet addiction that would one day spill from my own pen.

Little did I know, decades later, that Professor Yankah's mourning voice would summon me to the fray, not as a spectator, but as a soldier in a war for the very veins of our land.

Saturday, September 27, 2025, when I stumbled upon Professor Kwesi Yankah’s elegy: "Farewell, River Ayensu", the words hit like a gut punch; adding more fuel to the already-flaming anti-galamsey fire burning in me.

Oh, the gory tableau he painted - and the ones being witnessed by all Ghanaians, in fevered dreams and field reports from the epicenters of galamsey heated and hurt as if I had found myself sitting in the belly of a blacksmiths furnace and waiting for his anvil to be my bed of greater anguish as his hammer hits hard.

Picture it: the River Ayensu, once a sapphire serpent slithering through Kwanyako's emerald folds, now a necrotic corpse bloated with betrayal. Her waters, that cradle of childhood fishing and lovers' whispers, have curdled into a viscous ochre slurry, heavy with the arsenic kiss of mercury-laced dredge.

The surface heaves like the hide of a plague-ridden beast, pocked with iridescent slicks of cyanide foam that bubble and pop with a sickly hiss, releasing vapors that claw at the throat like invisible talons.

The galamsey scourge spreads its rot like gangrene through Ghana's arteries. Pra, Ankobra, Birim—they all bear the scars of this ecocidal frenzy.

Vast pits yawn like open wounds in the forest's flesh, swallowing acres of cocoa groves and cassava fields, their edges crumbling into landslides of sterile silt that bury villages in moonless nights.

The air hangs thick with the acrid reek of diesel fumes and chemical rot, a miasma that seeps into lungs and dreams, birthing epidemics of kidney failure in the young and barren wombs in the fertile.

Children, with skin as dark as the earth they once tilled, now scoop drinking water from these poisoned chalices, their tiny hands trembling as the liquid sloshes orange and opaque, laced with heavy metals that will etch their bones hollow by adolescence.

Birds plummet from poisoned skies, their wings weighted by fallout dust, crashing into the sludge like feathered omens.

The miners themselves; hollow-eyed wraiths chasing fool's gold - succumb to the beast they unleashed: skin sloughing in chemical burns, madness blooming from mercury's neurological bite, bodies twisted in the churn of excavators that grind bone and hope alike.

Are we not inundated with gory news of lives that get stuck in pits on a daily basis? And we say that the ecocide scourge has not yet reached alarming proportions?

Professor Kwesi Yankah's lament was no mere obituary; it was a tocsin, ringing through the chambers of my bleeding heart.

From the boy who traced his barbs on newsprint margins, I have become a man: A Nation-Builder (not a politician). I am unable to mourn from afar; I am an active participant in waging a relentless war against the ecocide galamsey apocalypse.

In the open spaces of advocacy, I have found my battalion: STOP EECOCIDE International; an indomitable cadre force, forging the fifth pillar of justice under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute.

Ecocide, they declare, must stand tall beside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, the crime of aggression.

Ecocide; a deliberate, large-scale assault on Mother Earth's lifeblood, must be prosecutable from The Hague to the galamsey pits.

I have arisen, pen to plowshare: writing articles and petitions that echo Professor Yankah's mourning yell.

As I read Professor Yankah paint the vivid innocence of his childhood and the environmental rape that has taken place in Agona Kwanyako, I cringed.

I know it for a fact that some people who hail from Agona Kwanyako but live in Accra; when travelling back to the village these days, have to transport yellow Kuffuor gallons of water because that is the only way they can have access to proper water. Yes; that is the sordid specter!

While mourning the mourning of Professor Yankah, I join many to became the bridge, translating the professor's poetic mourning-fury into the dry thunder of international law, co-authoring briefs that brand galamsey not as petty theft, but as the ECOCIDE CRIME that it is: the systematic evisceration of ecosystems, leaving scorched earth for generations unborn.

Now, I am woven into this saga's warp and weft—a Kwatriot reborn, my bylines flanking the global chorus demanding accountability.

From Burma Camp's innocent Saturdays to the ICC's austere benches, the Kwatriot orbits.

We shall resist oppressors' rule with all our will and might FOREVERMORE.

This well-orchestrated daylight murder and vile raping of the environment must stop NOW!!!!!

Samuel Koku Anyidoho
(Founder and CEO, MILLS Institute For Transformational Leadership Development)

Email:Sitsoanyidoho1@yahoo.com
Sunday, September 28, 2025.

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