Lumbering and Galamsey - When It Rains It Pours

In just under fifty years, Ghana has transformed from a plush greenery country with so much fresh air, into a nation facing serious challenges in the environment and ecology.

I quite remember in 1972, we accompanied my father, who drove from Abidjan in La Cote d'Ivoire to Accra, in Ghana. We went up north and crossed into the country through the Brong Ahafo Region. It was all green, and the tall trees created a canopy which blocked the sunlight, making it seem as if it was a blanket of dark rain clouds covering the sky.

I remember one town on the way called Koforidua, and that name stuck in my head, because I was then a student of Pope John's in Koforidua in the Eastern Region. The taste of fresh air was so sweet in that cool serene atmosphere.

All over to Accra the greenery was in majestic evidence, and God's love emanated through nature.

Thirty years later, in 2004, I went to accompany a friend to bury his wife in Wenchi, and I was shocked at what I saw. There was Koforidua alright, but it looked more like a town along the Tema-Ada highway. All the tall trees were gone.

Lumbering is creating environmental hazard to our country, and it is quite obvious that timber contractors simply refuse to plant trees after they fell some.

From the way things are going, if care is not taken and checks are not made, we shall have an arid country in the midst of a tropical rain forest zone.

It behooves this government to take the necessary steps and resource the Forestry Commission with logistics and very attractive pay packages and other benefits to protect our forests and greenery. Ghana needs to invest big time into our foresters and treat them as royals, for we harm ourselves if we regard them as also-runs. The job of a forester is very important, as is the case in countries that take their environment serious.

Such countries stand out as the preferred choice for tourists among others. Trees are life, and so it was in environmental-serious nations like Burkina Faso. This country, if its citizens play the act as envisaged by Sankara, will be a miracle in the desert.

We hear that the country is well zoned, and the environmental laws are strictly implemented and adhered to. Herds of cattle, sheep and goats have restricted movement, and they dare not go jaywalking in any field at all, especially, in areas zoned for crop production.

Burkina Faso, from a combination of Mossi and Dyula words which mean the "The Fatherland of Honest People" or "The Land of the Incorruptible," is now producing fresh strawberry and exporting the fruit to Europe. The Burkinabe, from Fula meaning "Men or Women," seem bent on doing the right things to transform their country from an arid place to a paradise of vegetation of trees, shrubs and bushes, with flowers and fruits in abundance. Here is a land where rights and responsibilities complement one another.

Down south, the story is different. A country of a population of over twenty-five million people, born with law in their genetic make-up, and who know their rights more than their responsibilities, have all decided to do their own thing by felling trees at random and selling them to foreigners, some from countries where all trees can be counted at a glance.

This land is Ghana, originally called Gold Coast, where wild life can sometimes run free, even in urban areas.

Fulani cattle herdsmen could respect and obey the environmental laws of Burkina Faso, because they risk law jail terms and lose of their cattle, if even one, but only looks in the direction of someone's farm. But, here in Ghana, they are allowed to graze anywhere, even near the office of the Presidency. Here we are told that the high and mighty would even ask the herdsmen to look after their cattle, and they careless what happens to the ordinary Ghanaian farmer, and so the migrants could beat up, maim, rape or even the Ghanaian.

They would torch our grasslands, so that when the fresh grass is sprouting, it could provide sweet meals for the cattle. Something they dare not try in Burkina Faso.

As if this is not okay, Ghana is opened up for business in the mining sector; and, again, we have expatriates led and escorted by Ghanaians taking control of over ninety per cent of the gold mining business.

That our sweet water bodies could be diverted and poisoned is no one's business. All they want is gold. The Bui Dam is not filling up, because the river upstream has been dammed and diverted.

Soon the poisoned river has started emptying into the Gulf of Guinea, and fishermen have started complaining. The fishes, sensing danger, have relocated, making it almost impossible to catch them.

Well, no one has cheated nature and come out triumphant. No one has done anything wrong to the soil, water bodies and environment and come out tops. Nature has a way of disciplining sinful, ginful, wineful man.

But has the tempo gone down? We hear there are galamsey (illegal mining) sites in the North, which are no-go areas for even the security forces, and these are still in full operation.

So soon Denkyira-Buasi is becoming history after it killed an innocent army officer, who was only on duty protecting this country.

The problem we have in this country is that we are ready to sell our own, to sell our heritage for some selfish gain, which is even a pittance.

We have successfully chopped down almost all our trees, and the agency involved in protecting our environment seems to be only interested in regulating the chopping down of trees in the urban areas, but will never extend that gesture to our forests.

So it is now, that as the lumber jacks are felling valuable trees and not taking the responsibility of replanting some in place, the illegal miners are also mowing down thousands of hectares of hitherto forest groves for precious minerals.

The Chinese, who have put up a policy to colonise Africa in the shortest possible time, will sign infrastructural development plans, and bring in a work force which could outnumber what the African nation can offer.

After doing an attractive but shoddy job, the Chinese labourers who are left redundant will head into the forests, not to admire and preserve nature, but to dig for gold, in ways frowned upon by their home nation's environmental laws.

Backed by the high and mighty, which may include chiefs, traditional leaders, opinion leaders, politicians, civil and public servants, security personnel and what-have-you, our heritage won and preserved for us through the toils and blood of our forefathers are vandalised.

The Chinese, who are joined by other Asians and African nationals, have a field day, and even as they flout the laws on mining, they even flout the rights of the ordinary Ghanaians. Our youth who feel that their future is fading in their sight are gunned when they go to question why. Our young women who will mother our future leaders are now being raped in a legal fashion, which may not be touched by law. A manipulated hour glass is set up, which can take more than hour to empty from one chamber to the other. The poor girl will be told that until the hour is gone, action continues, and should she object, she will not be paid anything, yes, not even on pro-lateral basis. Other women have become mothers to Sino-Ghanaian children, whose future could possibly be in jeopardy, since, in fact, they have none. Their Chinese fathers will either deny knowledge of fatherhood, or leave them with their poverty-stricken mothers, while they go back to China to live wealthy lives from the Ghanaian gold they have stolen. Yes! stolen, because they are not supposed to mine in the first place, and if they want gold, they should have gone to the precious minerals offices. Yes! stolen, because they get the gold out without any documents for us to know how much went out. So if the Chinese give us $3 billion as a loan to be repaid with interest, and they steal an equivalent of ten thousand bars of gold a year, it will mean the nation has lost $5.064 billion. So in a year, we have given the Chinese over $5.0 billion for free, while, at the same time, we struggle to pay the $3 billion loan they gave us.

Are we a serious nation at all? We watch on as the foreigners, who are not to mine, come and bring in heavy machinery, and watch them steal our heritage. And guess what, once the gold sets out of the country through fishing vessels owned by the Chinese, we cannot retrieve them. There are no documents on them, but there are documents on the Chinese loan, and we have the obligation to service the loan.

Lumbering and galamsey are quickly doing us in, and when nature also decides to extact vengeance on the way we are treating it, who do we blame, the government in place or the high and mighty? None of the above; we need to blame ourselves for not standing up to make sure that the right things were done.

If galamsey done in the countryside is affecting the flow of water into the Bui dam, hence, making it run inefficiently, we suffer as a nation. If galamsey done in the countryside is affecting the marine fisheries, we suffer as a nation. If galamsey is poisoning our water bodies and turning our arable lands into infertile ones, hence, reducing the quantity of potable water produced and lowering food production, who do we blame when disease and hunger takes over?

When that time comes, and nature helps to make matters worse, we will then know that when it rains, it pours.

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