The founder of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG), Mr Percival Kofi Akpaloo
The founder of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG), Mr Percival Kofi Akpaloo, is calling for a temporary ban on all small-scale and community mining activities in the country.
That, he believes, will allow the government to put in place measures to monitor and regularise the operations of all small-scale miners.
Party position
Stating the LPG’s position on the fight against illegal mining, Mr Akpaloo said at the moment it was impossible to regulate small-scale mining because authorities could not keep up with the vast number of operators.
He said during the period of the proposed ban, the government should encourage all small-scale miners to merge their operations and resources to make their activities easier to track and regulate.
“We (LPG) have a suggestion that we should ban all small-scale mining including this community mining that has been introduced in the system,” Mr Akpaloo told the Daily Graphic yesterday in a telephone interview.
“Because when you have so many people working in those areas and everybody is digging here and there, they will destroy the land no matter how you regulate them since they don’t have the capacity to go deeper and do only surface mining,” he added.
“The best thing is to bring all of them together to form a company, we can get about four or five companies out of them because we have more than 200 companies in small-scale mining and this will help them to share equipment as well as resources and also create many jobs”, Mr Akpaloo said.
He said currently the state authorities were only able to monitor the activities of established mining companies such as Anglogold Ashanti and Newmont.
Support for Operation Halt
He said the LPG also endorsed the destruction of excavators being used for illegal mining (galamsey) in Ghana.
To him, the burning of the excavators was a sad but necessary measure which indicates the government’s seriousness in the renewed fight against illegal mining.
“I am in full support of what the government is doing, especially the burning of excavators, though we could have put them to another use but without the control boards of such machines, they must be destroyed.
“Now people have seen that the government is serious about the fight and people with such machines in water bodies and forest reserves have started taking them away,” Mr Akpaloo said.
Prosecution
Mr Akpaloo said the party was also advocating swift prosecution of cases involving illegal mining.
He said if hefty fines and jail terms were handed down to illegal miners, it would serve as a deterrent.
