A "New Year Honour" For The Chinese Ambassador To Ghana

H.E. Madam Sun Baohong, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to Ghana

Dear Madam,

I was extremely pleased to read that you took the Chinese delegation to the inauguration of our new President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (led by Mr Wang Zhengwei, Special Envoy of the Chinese Leader, Xi Jinping) to see President Akufo-Addo at the Flagstaff House in Accra on Monday, 9 January 2017 – President Akufo-Addo's first day at work.

I do not, of course, know what sort of discussions took place between your delegation and the president behind closed doors during the visit. The public part of the discussions, however, was, as could be expected, full of warm sentiments reinforcing 'co-operation' between Ghana and China.

“We would love very much to continue building the strong relationship that we have with China in so many different areas, particularly in economic development,” the president said. He added that relations between both countries had grown better in the last 10 years and waxed “stronger” when he, the president, was the Foreign Minister in the government of Ex-President John Kufuor.

Mr Wang Zhengwei, on his part, lauded the co-operation between the two countries, particularly progress made in aviation and energy. He said China looked forward to more communications and bilateral relations in international and regional issues of common concern, “especially those concerning people's livelihood.”

I have drawn attention to Mr Wang's statement on developments that affect people's livelihood because, whether President Akufo-Addo mentioned the subject behind closed doors or not, the elephant in the room would have been galamsey – the process whereby Ghanaian criminals, in collaboration with Chinese “investors”, have laid waste to a large number of Ghana's water-bodies, in an operation that involves dredging rivers to seek gold nuggets buried in the riverbeds.

Our president, is of course, a consummate diplomat, and so whatever he said regarding the issue – if he said anything at all — may have been clothed in polite words and sugar-coated aphorisms. But not so the president's fellow-citizens, especially, those who live in the constituency which he represented in Parliament for many years. One of these, Nana Asiedu Boafo The Second, wrote the following article on 13 January 2017:

After a recent three-week visit to my home-town in the Atiwa District, I have spent sleepless nights agonising and grieving over the incalculable damage which the Chinese are inflicting on our country, particularly in the rural areas, through illegal mining and galamsey, and the consequent massive degradation of our land and pollution of almost all our river bodies.

The iconic and totemic river of the Akyem ethnic group, the River Birem, has long since been degraded into a slow-moving muddy sludge, but now I noticed that all her tributaries, such as the Asuorkoor and Boanor, have also been heavily polluted and even more dangerously, poisoned with cyanide and mercury, converting the previously crystal clear colour into greenish brown waste water.

Our forests have been quite irreversibly degraded and our cocoa farms, oil palm plantations, as well as other cash and food crop farms, are being totally destroyed by these rapacious swarms of Chinese gold diggers, fortune hunters and their Ghanaian surrogates, collaborators and connivers!

And what are the local people and their chiefs doing about all these? Well, the Chinese legions and their local auxiliaries are armed with a wide range of modern weaponry, including the famous AK47s, SMGs, Israeli Uzi sub-machine guns that would put many African armies and police forces to shame! And they always entice the teeming unemployed youth of our towns and villages to their side with promises of instant lucrative jobs. So, woe betides any chief or opinion leader who is fingered by the Chinese and their assigns as seeking to put obstacles in their way!

Such “uncooperative” chiefs and opinion leaders are invariably subjected to cruel physical and verbal molestation and often driven out of town…. Rather sadly, Ghanaian chiefs don't own any modern weapons at all even for self-protection…. !

Quite apart from this fact, the Constitution and the Minerals and Mining Act vest the ownership of all minerals in the country in the President who then delegates all licensing authority over minerals and mining to the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, and further down to the Minerals Commission, who together are responsible for the issuance of prospecting and mining licences to would-be miners, including the Chinese and their Ghanaian front men.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is then supposed to have the final say by issuing out the Environmental Impact Clearance Certificates before the commencement of actual mining operations. In all these, the chiefs and their communities' influence are very minimal indeed. And yet there is a widespread belief and perception throughout Ghana that the chiefs are the “worst culprits” as a friend of mine recently put it, for the depredations of the Chinese gold diggers and galamseyers, a situation totally out of keeping with the facts on the ground…..

Indeed, I have personally been shut up in my one-entrance- and-exit-only Ahenfie [palace] for a whole anxiety-packed day by an irate group of some 500 youth high on hard liquor and perhaps other substances baying for my blood for similar alleged sabotage offences!

And so until we as a people come up with the unvarnished truth about the real culprits of the Chinese operated galamsey menace, we shall never be able to, and in the position to bring it under effective control.

For instance, who is responsible for bringing all those continuous swarms of Chinese fortune hunters into the country? Is it the largely rural domiciled chiefs or is it the Immigration people or the police? ….What are we doing?

The situation is so dire that even the state-controlled forest reserves are being invaded and plundered by the Chinese and their Ghanaian henchmen with excavators and the full range of other mining equipment. And yet we have always had a government which controls the Ghana Armed Forces, the Police Service, the BNI, the Immigration Service, the National Security.

Do we have a governing authority in the land guarding over our national interest and sovereignty at all? Would any Ghanaian or African be permitted to do in China even a tiny fraction of what the Chinese are doing here in Ghana? So I ask again, is anybody in charge of the entity called Ghana at all?”

Madam Ambassador, the article above confirms what I told you earlier, that feelings are running very high against your country in Ghana at present. Please liaise with the Ghana Ministry of the Environment and invite a delegation from the Ministry to go to China and discuss with their Chinese counterparts, a programme for surveying the amount of damage done, and what steps can be taken, late though it is, to try and reverse the damage.

Meanwhile, for failing to get your government to act strongly against galamsey and thereby imperilling the friendly relations that exist between Ghana and China, I, hereby, award you The Order Of The Rotting Tilapia.

www.cameronduodu.com
By Cameron Duodu