A senior academic and public official has pushed back against growing calls for a state of emergency in Ghana’s fight against illegal mining, arguing that the country needs to rethink its entire approach to galamsey rather than reach for increasingly forceful short-term measures.
Professor Martin Oteng-Ababio, Board Chairman of the Forest Plantation Development Fund, made the remarks on Channel One on Tuesday, May 26, delivering what amounted to a pointed critique of the frameworks Ghana has repeatedly deployed — and repeatedly found wanting — in its efforts to end illegal mining.
At the core of Professor Oteng-Ababio’s argument is a call for intellectual honesty about what galamsey actually is and why it persists. A state of emergency, he argued, bypasses that essential step.
“It is about understanding the mathematics in it and trying to find an antidote,” he said, framing the crisis less as a law enforcement failure and more as a deeply rooted socioeconomic phenomenon that blunt instruments cannot dismantle.
His position is that durability, not intensity, is the measure that matters. “This fight is a process, not an action. Our ability to sustain the fight is the cardinal point in this game,” he stated — a rebuke, in effect, to the cycle of high-profile crackdowns that generate headlines but leave the underlying drivers of illegal mining largely intact.
Ghana Seems To Have Lost The Fight Against Galamsey
Professor Oteng-Ababio was equally direct about the limits of military-led enforcement, a strategy Ghana has returned to repeatedly across successive administrations.
“The fight against illegal mining or the use of the military to fight illegal mining has not been successful and will never be successful unless and until we understand the basic principle underpinning what they are doing,” he said.
His critique extended beyond effectiveness into equity. Military operations, he argued, are neither politically neutral nor socially impartial in how they land. The people most likely to bear the consequences of enforcement are the small-scale and subsistence-level operators at the bottom of the galamsey chain — not the financiers and power brokers whose capital drives the industry and who, as he put it, “go free.”
“Because the use of the military is neither apolitical nor — in fact it is almost always the poor who suffer. Those who own them go free,” he added.
What Professor Oteng-Ababio is calling for, implicitly, is a galamsey strategy built around sustainable intervention rather than periodic shows of force — one that targets the economic logic and the financial networks that make illegal mining viable, rather than the visible and most vulnerable faces of it.
It is a perspective that sits in tension with the urgency many Ghanaians feel about the destruction of the country’s water bodies and forest reserves. But his argument is that urgency without strategy has already been tried — and the rivers are still running brown.
Credit: Channel One TV