The President Has The Responsibility To Hold All Mineral Resources In This Country – Oliver Baker

The President has the responsibility to hold all mineral resources in this country in trust. As trustee, he has definite trust responsibilities vis-a-vis us the beneficiaries. 

With the resources, we could bring a class action against him and several mineral entities. Elizabeth Vaah has led environmental advocacy on this issue for years and after she reached out to me, we explored funding for such environmental litigation unsuccessfully.

A such class action is still something we are committed to. But anytime you take up any public issue, you are most often on your own and out of pocket! 

To get a civil society that stands up to the abuse of power, we need to resource it. We can’t continue to depend on foreign taxpayers subsidizing the civil space in Ghana. 

For some reason too, it is some of our respected and leading civil society that are leading calls for political parties to be publically funded; when they are already the richest civil actors.

Through their access to illicit funding, they have muscled everyone out and have the capacity to organize and mobilize at an unimaginable scale.

We need to level the playing field. The reason we can’t do anything about Galamsey, even though fix the country has a strong on-the-ground presence in those communities comes down to the financial resources. 

Donors will much rather fund workshops at Kempinski for elite folk to talk about active citizenship than put the money into groups that are trying to mobilize civic action on the ground. Elite CSOs will rather crowd the space than recognize their limitations and explore genuine partnerships, and so this is how far the workshops and foreign money have brought us.

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Elizabeth Vaah