The Ghana National Association of Small-scale Miners has bemoaned calls for a ban on all mining activities, stating that Ghanaians have not been fair to them.
The small-scale miners deny any culpability in the destruction caused in forest reserves and the pollution of waterbodies as a result of illegal mining activities, popularly known as galamsey.
General Secretary of the miners, Godwin Armah, urged that the call for a total ban on mining activities must be scrutinized thoroughly and understood before any decisive action is taken.
Godwin Armah told the host of The Big Issue, Selorm Adonoo, on Channel One TV and Citi FM that the fight against galamsey will be successful if the issues are properly understood.
He argued that small-scale miners are not responsible for all the damage happening because licenses are not issued to their members but the large-scale mining companies. "If you are calling for a total ban without understanding the underlying issues and looking at them brick by brick, we will not be able to resolve this issue.
We realised after 2016 that illegal miners invaded AngloGold Ashanti's concession and the small-scale association agreed and government placed a ban on small-scale mining to bring proper intervention into the space and the majority of us lost so much of our capital. "If you are calling for a ban and you say small-scale miners who are not issued licenses in the forest reserves should be banned, I think that Ghanaians are not being fair to us.
The licences in forest reserves are for large-scale mining so why are we not saying they should also be banned?" "No small-scale miner is issued a license to operate in waterbodies and so you can see that there are floating dredges that are dredging around river bodies and causing siltation and increasing turbidity levels of the river bodies," Godwin Armah added.