A Forest Ranger Died Guarding Our Water. What Do We Owe Him?

Ghanafuor, on Saturday 22 August 2026, a man of fifty-nine was shot in the chest in a forest in the Central Region and left to die among the trees he had spent thirty-seven years protecting.

His name was Nana Richard Otwey. He was a Senior Ranger of the Kakum Conservation Area, and he was leading a team of four Wildlife Resource Guards on a three-day patrol at Briscoe 2 Camp, near the Kruwa community, when the patrol met two men it believed were poaching. One was arrested. The other, alleged to have fired the shot, is still at large, with a reward of GH¢50,000 on his head.

Nana Otwey joined the Wildlife Division on 1 October 1989 as a Skilled Labourer. He rose, by work and by commitment, to Senior Ranger, and he held that rank until his death. He was also the Mmrantehene of Afeaso. He leaves a wife and a child.

The Forestry Commission did the decent thing, and I want to say so plainly before I say anything else, because the men and women of that institution are not the problem in this story. It paid its last respects at Abrafo-Odumase. It covered the funeral, the coffin, the mortuary, the canopies, the chairs. It unveiled a bust in his honour in front of the administration office at Kakum National Park, and his colleagues fired a twenty-one gun salute over it. It made a donation to his widow and his child. The Chief Executive, Dr Hugh C. A. Brown, called him principled, courageous, loyal.

All of that is honour, and honour matters. But a bust is what a state gives when it has decided not to give the thing that would have kept the man alive.

So let me tell you what he was actually guarding, because we in this country have a habit of describing forests as scenery and then being surprised when nobody wants to pay for scenery.

Kakum is some 350 square kilometres of moist evergreen forest, gazetted in 1991 and 1992 as a national park and a resource reserve, and it is the first national park in Ghana created on local initiative rather than by the flat of a distant agency. It holds some forty species of larger mammals, more than two hundred species of birds, four hundred butterflies, and trees that reach sixty-five metres. Its canopy walkway, three hundred and fifty metres of rope and plank strung between seven treetops, was the first of its kind on this continent, and it drew a record 185,740 visitors in 2019.

But the reason it must not be lost is not the walkway.

The headwaters of the Kakum River lie inside the park's boundaries. That river, with its tributaries, supplies fresh water to Cape Coast and to 133 other towns and villages. Not metaphorically. Not as an ecosystem service to be admired in a brochure. As water, in pipes, in pots, in the bodies of people who have never once thought about where it comes from.

Nana Otwey was not guarding trees. He was guarding the water supply of a region, on a salary, in a uniform, with a team of four.

And here is the accounting error that killed him.

A forest's water has no invoice. The rain falls, the river runs, the taps open, and nobody sends a bill for the catchment. Because the service is unpriced, it enters no budget. Because it enters no budget, the people who protect it are the cheapest line in the whole system, and the easiest to leave unfunded. So we arrive at the arrangement we currently have: a state that pays a man a ranger's wage to stand between armed men and a watershed worth more than the entire tourism receipts of the republic, and then calls his death untimely.

The poachers understand this economics better than the ministry does. To them, a ranger is a cost of doing business, and a dead ranger costs them nothing at all.

We are not alone in this, and the world's numbers make the pattern plain. Global Witness, in its report published in September 2026, documented at least 124 land and environmental defenders killed around the world in 2025, bringing the total since 2012 to 2,375. More than three quarters of those killed were small-scale farmers, Indigenous peoples or Afro-descendant peoples. In Africa, at least 126 have been killed or disappeared since 2012, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounts for nearly two thirds of them, including two park rangers killed while working against poaching and mining in Upemba National Park.

Ghana will not appear in that tally this year. Our rangers are not counted as defenders, and I suspect that is part of the problem: we do not count them, so we do not have to provide for them.

Now for the part that should make a minister uncomfortable, because the solution is not a mystery and has not been a mystery for some time.

In April 2026, the journal Koedoe published an analysis of ten years of ranger patrol data from Kakum, covering 2012 to 2021. It is the first long-term study of its kind in Ghana's most visited protected area. It identified twelve indicators of poaching, from poachers' paths and gunshots to footprints, snares and gin traps. It found that sustained law enforcement probably reduced poaching. And it found that illegal activity persists and adapts.

Its recommendations were three. Strengthen community participation. Ensure consistent patrol funding across the entire reserve. Use technology.

Read that again and then look at the date. The answer was in print before the bullet was fired. The problem is not that we do not know what to do. The problem is that knowing has never been the same as budgeting.

Meanwhile the forest outside the park boundary is going, and the numbers are not subtle. A national-scale assessment published in 2026 found that Ghana lost roughly 279,227 hectares of forest between 2015 and 2025, with 149,984 hectares of that going in the last five years alone, and it named the drivers plainly: agricultural expansion and mining, with the underlying causes still active even as the headline rate dips. The Forestry Commission's own figure is around 120,000 hectares a year. Cocoa accounts for something like 13 per cent of the forest lost inside protected areas since 2000. And a 2024 World Bank report put the cost of deforestation and forest degradation at about 2.5 per cent of Ghana's annual economic output.

Set those two facts beside each other and you have the whole tragedy in one line. We are liquidating an asset that produces water, carbon, rainfall and breathable air, and we are booking the proceeds as growth.

So, Ghanafuor, what do we actually do? I have seven suggestions, and not one of them requires a new ministry.

First, put the watershed on the water bill. If Kakum's rivers supply Cape Coast and 133 other towns and villages, then every customer of Ghana Water Limited in those districts should pay a small catchment protection levy, a pesewa or two per cubic metre, ring-fenced by law, spent on patrols, vehicles and ranger salaries, and published in an annual account that anybody can read. The people who drink the water become the payroll of the people who guard it. That is not charity. It is a service charge on a service already being consumed for free.

Second, build a ranger service, not a labour grade. Nana Otwey joined as a Skilled Labourer and retired, thirty-seven years later, as a Senior Ranger. That is a forestry career. It is not a career for men who will meet armed poachers in the dark. Anti-poaching needs proper recruitment, fitness standards, radio networks, body armour where the threat justifies it, a clear use-of-force protocol, and life insurance that pays out without a family having to petition anybody. And when a ranger is killed on duty, the compensation should be statutory and automatic, not a donation announced at a funeral.

Third, go after the buyer, not only the man with the gun. A GH¢50,000 bounty on one fugitive is a price on a head. It is not a policy. Poaching is a supply chain with a market at the end of it: the bushmeat trader, the restaurant, the courier, the buyer of rosewood, the financier of the galamsey pit. Until the person who pays for the carcass faces the same risk as the person who pulls the trigger, we are chasing the poorest link in a profitable chain and calling it enforcement.

Fourth, pay the communities that live with the cost. Fifty-two villages surround Kakum. Those villages absorb the elephants that eat the crops, the patrols that close the paths, and the tourists who arrive on buses. The Koedoe study's first recommendation was community participation, and participation without money is a consultation. Share the gate receipts with the communities on a published formula, contract them for patrol support and monitoring, and give the young men who would otherwise carry a gun into the forest a paid reason to carry a radio instead.

Fifth, instrument the forest. Camera traps, GPS on every patrol, a national incidents register that records every snare lifted, every gunshot heard, every arrest and every prosecution outcome, published quarterly by district. The Kakum study exists because somebody kept ranger patrol records for ten years. That should be standard everywhere, not a research project.

Sixth, put natural capital in the budget. Ghana's accounts record a standing tree as worth nothing and a felled one as income. Until the forest appears as an asset on the nation's balance sheet, and its destruction as depreciation, every finance minister will keep discovering that conservation is unaffordable, because the ledger will keep agreeing with him. Natural capital accounting is not an academic indulgence. It is the only way a watershed ever wins an argument with a gold pit.

Seventh, and most immediately, make a ranger's death a matter of public record. An inquest, a prosecution review, and a published finding within a year. Not because it will bring him back, but because a state that does not investigate the killing of its own forest guards is telling the next poacher exactly what a guard is worth.

And this is not only Kakum's argument. It is the argument of every hotspot we have left. It is the Atewa hills, 25,818 hectares reserved in 1926 for the headwaters of the Birim, the Densu and the Ayensu, where the Densu runs 116 kilometres to the Weija dam and some five million people depend on the three rivers. It is the same logic in a different forest: the water is free, so the forest is expendable, so the people who defend it are expendable too. Until we price the service, we will keep paying in bodies, and we will keep unveiling busts.

There is a version of this that ends well, and it is unglamorous. It is a catchment levy on a water bill. It is a ranger with a radio, insurance and a supervisor who answers the phone. It is a community with a share of the gate. It is patrol funding that does not lapse when the donor project cycle ends, because that is exactly the failure the Kakum study warned about.

The Forestry Commission has honoured its dead man as well as an institution can. A bust at the administration office, a salute, a widow provided for. Now let the rest of us do the harder thing, and pay for the forest while the men guarding it are still alive.

Nana Richard Otwey gave thirty-seven years and then his life to a piece of this country that most Ghanaians will never visit and all of us drink from. The least we owe him is a budget line. His sacrifice must not be in vain.

We need to get that clearly, oooo, Ghanafuor. Yooooooooooo. A word to the wise…

Ghana #Kakum #Biodiversity #EcosystemServices #Rangers #Forests #Ubuntu

Cheers,
Boardy