Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has promised to fight the illegal mining menace by using the Ghana Card to track those involved in such acts.
According to him, his strategy for combating the menace will be to adopt a preventive approach that will empower the Geological Survey Authority to prospect for minerals and create a resource pool of equipment to support sustainable mining practices.
Speaking at a campaign tour of the Kpone Katamanso constituency in the Greater Accra Region, the NPP’s 2024 Flagbearer stressed the need to sanitise and regulate small-scale mining activities in the country.
“I want us to set up community mining schemes with certainty from the Geological Survey Department that here you have gold in that place, we can make sure where they are mining has gold. We direct them to areas and do responsible mining and sustainable mining. If you don’t regulate them, they will hide and do it. We need to enforce the laws, direct so that we can monitor what they are doing.
Once they go here and know that you get gold, all of them come with their Ghana Cards. We monitor you and provide you with user facilities. Then there is no need to go elsewhere and destroy the environment,” he noted.
“We are trying to chase people, but we are not trying to prevent it from happening in the first place. It is time, one needs to look at the whole regime of small-scale mining and sanitise the regime, regularise the regime, enforce the law and make sure that the Geological Survey Authority of Ghana does all the mapping for where all the gold reserves are. There is no data backing it. People are doing trial and error, destroying the environment wherever they go. They just go and dig; they don’t find it. Then they go to the next place, and they start digging; they don’t find, they go to the next place,” he explained.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/103.5FM/Mary Mensah
