Editorial: Welcome Blue Water Guards But …

The Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah, has according to a story we have carried at our front page today, launched a Blue Water Initiative to protect our water bodies from further pollution by illegal miners, otherwise known as galamsey. Four hundred people, mostly youth, have already been recruited and will be trained by the Ghana Navy to patrol the water bodies.

It is important to stress that this is not the first time the government has recruited people to patrol the water bodies. Indeed, the previous administration, headed by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo took a similar decision, but at the end of the day, nothing good came out of it. Much as the current government’s decision is going to create jobs for the teeming youth, the needed mechanism, in our view, should be put in place to ensure that the state gets value for money.

Signal we are getting from Ashanti Region indicates that the fight against illegal miners is becoming a herculean task, because before security personnel get to the bush, the illegal miners had already gotten information about their intended operation. The big question is: who is passing on this security information to the illegal miners for them to escape arrest?

The Chronicle is highly suspicious that the same security personnel tasked to flash out the miners and protect our water bodies and forests are those behind the leakage of the information. In Ghana people pretend to be working for the state as the government pretend to be paying them, but in actual fact they are only interested in making money outside their salaries.

This is why the Lands and Natural Resources Minister, Armah Kofi Buah, should not only be interested in giving jobs to people, but actually ensure that these people execute the jobs without any blemish. We do not want to see a situation where these river guards will turn their mandate into a money making machine by allowing themselves to be compromised by the illegal miners.

We, however, believe that if stringent measures are put in place, it will deter them from accepting any bait from the illegal miners. Some of these measures should include understanding that they would only be paid based on the turbidity level of the river bodies they have been assigned to protect. If, after working for three months, the turbidity level of the water has not improved, they would be sacked.

The Chronicle suggests that they are made to append their signatures to a performance contract, so that we would avoid the situation where they would still be ‘happy to be working’ even if they are not paid for failing to meet their targets. We should not gloss over the fact that they are going to be dealing with people who are digging for gold and, therefore, have cash to influence them. If the guard has not been paid for three months, the ‘side issues’ alone is enough to motivate him to continuously work against the interest of the state.

This is why we are proposing that they should be sacked after three months if the turbidity level of the water is the same. This is not the time to be playing with party cards – it is time for serious business -because the very survival of this country is being threatened by these illegal miners who are being financed by top business people in Accra and Kumasi.

Until recently, we all thought the Volta River has been spared this scourge of galamsey, but the opposite is the case. If we sit down unconcerned without looking at the importance of the longest river in Ghana, this country will be destroyed beyond recovery. It appears people are only interested in the money that they would make today.

What happens tomorrow doesn’t concern them and this is sad. If our forefathers had toed similar line, will there be Ghana for us today? This is food for thought.

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