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16.05.2017 Feature Article

Okyenhene Must Do More Than Huff And Puff Over Galamsey Menace And His Alleged Role In It

Okyenhene Must Do More Than Huff And Puff Over Galamsey Menace And His Alleged Role In It
16.05.2017 LISTEN

He knows very well as anybody else that I personally love and respect this quite powerful and influential relative of mine, whom I have met a couple of times and spoken to on pressing national issues by phone on several occasions. And so it is not very easy for me to write or speak to the issue of Galamsey, or illegal mining, activities and how the latter have not only polluted both major and minor water bodies in the largest and most dominant traditional polity in Ghana’s Eastern Region, to wit, Okyeman or Akyem-Abuakwa, but have also made life literally ungovernable for the citizens and inhabitants of this otherwise lush environment and major farming community.

It is not easy for me because Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, and I are cousins on my father’s side, although once, about a decade ago, I had the great shame and misfortune of being literally put in my place by a recently deceased sister of the Okyenhene, a queenmother of Akyem-Apinamang, I had not known previously, who ordered me to side out of a podium congregation of the grandchildren of the Okyenhene for the presentation of a portrait that, I presume, a couple of his relatives had purchased for him at New York Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell’s State Office Building. But for the timely intervention of another, a grandson of the Okyenhene whom I had also not known previously, and whose name and identity I still do not remember, I would have had absolutely no other alternative but to walk off-podium in deep mortification.

It is a scar that I am sure to carry for the rest of my life. I had not intended to attend the ceremony, but for the sake of a dream that I had had, in which my late father asked me to financially help out his 80-plus-year-old cousin, Pastor Agyei-Kumi, whom my father told me, in my dream, was in great distress. I had therefore gone to the gathering at Harlem’s State Office Building, hoping to find a Kyebi native who knew the man and was willing to carry the last forty dollars that I had on me in my wallet to Opanyin Agyei-Kumi at Kyebi-Aburaso in Oburonikurom. It would be my first and last encounter with Mr. Ferdinand Ayim who, it turns out, had added some of his own money to mine and given it Osofo Agyei-Kumi, whom Mr. Ayim claimed had been good friends with his own late father. Well as it turned out, a seriously ill Rev. Agyei-Kumi had gone to the Suhum Government Hospital, only to be prescribed some medication he had no means of purchasing. In short, he was waiting for Almighty Death to carry him home to the other side of the here-and-now.

At any rate, my relationship with the Okyenhene, both biologically and politically, or culturally, I must aptly say, goes much deeper and farther than that. But for now, let the preceding mini-narrative suffice by way of foregrounding, while we delve into the much more important and far-reaching problem of Galamsey, not only in Akyem-Abuakwa but the entire nation at large. Indeed, as I hinted in a previous column, recently, I have agonized over the problem of Galamsey for quite a remarkable while now, and have even had occasion to pose Osagyefo Amoatia a question or two about the same, to which he had promptly and aptly fingered the central government.

Aptly so, because from what most of us already know, most Galamsey operatives, or Galamseyers, whose predatory and environmentally destructive activities have been questioned, have in the recent past pointed to administrators at the Ministry of Lands and Forestry Resources as their sources of certification and/or authorization for these criminally dehumanizing and predatory activities. And so it is rather strange for agents of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), the nation’s central intelligence agency, to have allegedly leaked a report pointing towards Ofori-Panyin Fie, or the Palace of His Majesty, The Okyenhene, as a major nerve center of Galamsey activities.

In the past, the Okyenhene has also been accused of violating the integrity of the Banso Pristine Forest where most of the past Okyeman Paramount Kings are buried. Osagyefo Amoatia has been accused of either granting permission for wanton logging activities to private contractors, or personally supervising such inexcusably execrable and sacrilegious activities. But for now, we intend to squarely focus on Galamsey activities which, as of this writing, was widely reported by the media to have caused the effective pollution of at least 60-percent of all water bodies in the country. Indeed, an environmental expert was recently quoted as having predicted that if predatory strip-mining activities are not immediately halted by the central government, within a decade or less, Ghanaians would likely be importing the bulk of our potable or drinkable water supply. That is how unacceptably worse this very bad situation has become.

Needless to say, the credibility of both the Okyenhene and the key operatives of the Bureau of National Investigations is at stake here. The Okyenhene has, reportedly, threatened that he is no longer going to tolerate such admittedly abusive accusations vis-à-vis his allegedly neck-deep involvement in Galamsey activities. “I am no longer going to take these accusations lying down. Anybody or group of persons who accuses me of Galamsey activities must be prepared to meet my lawyers in court,” Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin was recently reported to have told a visiting delegation from the Council-of-State to his Ofori-Panyin Palace at Kyebi. But, of course, the issuance of such threats in of themselves are not nearly enough. Osagyefo Amoatia has to force the BNI operatives to publicly reveal the source or sources of their accusation, as well as the forensic process used for arriving at the inescapably outrageous charge that, indeed, the Palace of the Okyenhene is head-over-heels involved in the environmentally destructive activities of Galamsey.

For, it goes without saying that a primary aspect of his royal mandate has to do with the Okyenhene’s ability and willingness to unreservedly ensure the protection and preservation of the humanity, dignity and survival of all citizens and inhabitants of Okyemen, Akyem-Mansa, or the Three Akyem States, to be precise (See “Okyenhene to Sue Anyone Who Links Him to Galamsey” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 5/14/17). Even more importantly, the Okyenhene and his Chiefs and Elders of the Okyeman Council have a bounden obligation to tell the nation what concrete steps they have taken, both in the past and the present, to seriously and constructively address the Galamsey menace, as well as the impact that such reparative measures have had. And also precisely who is/are to blame for the present bleak state of affairs and why.

It would also be quite instructive to learn what the Okyenhene has to say about the recent affording of a State Burial to the late Nana Kwame Agyei-Boateng, aged 49, a rabid critic of the Okyenhene and a claimant to the Ofori-Panyin Stool. There are serious environmental and human development problems in Okyeman, and the national in general, that need to be frontally and dispassionately tackled beyond all the name-calling and the unsavory contest of personalities.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

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