Is Militarising Ghana’s Forest Reserves the Only Way to Defeat Galamsey?

Dear critical reader, unlike most journalists and environmental activists, I am a committed conservationist and human rights activist who is also an actual landowner. I hail from one of the largest freehold extended family clan private sector landowners in Ghana, so I know what it means to contend with crooked family members and the galamsey networks with which they collude to brutally ravage Mother Nature, with near-total impunity, on a daily basis.

Having grappled with this canker for nearly four decades now, I am aware that Ghana is now a nation whose often-hypocritical society is anchored in duplicity, faced with an existential threat from powerful resource warlords unhinged by a greed for gold that is hard to fathom. They are, in effect, waging an undeclared war using a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners strategy against law-abiding Ghanaians, with the active connivance of greed-fuelled, corrupt elements in officialdom. This enables them to use armed, drug-fuelled foot soldiers who work their mining pits to achieve their goal of sending their net worth to stratospheric heights at society’s expense.

On a warming planet in the AI age, with its many positive tipping point nation-building possibilities, our natural heritage is now more valuable for our well-being and welfare than all the minerals underneath it combined. Intact forests underpin water security, climate stability, biodiversity, carbon markets, and ecotourism. They are the infrastructure for a 21st-century economy. Yet we are sacrificing them for gold that enriches a few and impoverishes the nation.

Unfortunately, the only way to stop galamsey is to transform the Forestry Commission into a specialised forest protection unit of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), akin to the Engineers Regiment. That would immediately make forest reserves nationwide military property and security zones from which all civilians, without exception, are banned, and entry into which would be by written permission of the Military High Command. They must be given operational shoot-to-kill powers and indemnified from prosecution when deaths occur while fighting galamseyers and other forest-destroying actors. Simple. Haaba.

Call to Action:
Ghana’s forests are our last line of defence against climate collapse, water insecurity, and national decay. If we will not defend them with the full weight of the state, we will lose them forever. I urge Parliament, the Military High Command, and every citizen who values the future to back a constitutional amendment that secures our reserves as military zones. The time for half-measures is over. In this AI age, we must choose living wealth over dead minerals. Choose the forests, or choose ruin.