Our gold is unfortunately blood-soaked; the prospecting and mining for the precious metal is shrouded in fatalities.
Last week ended on a bloody note; an illegal miner lost his life leaving his family to live with the pain of losing a relative. It was one of the many bloody engagements between illegal miners and law enforcement agents deployed to bring the anomaly under control.
Many persons, both law enforcement personnel, innocent individuals and illegal miners, have died under circumstances related to the quest for gold; unfortunately, it is continuing. As for the many innocent persons who have lost their lives after falling into abandoned illegal mining pits, not much is said about them and sadly so.
The daredevil posture of the illegal miners when they dared the armed cops could not have come about from the void. There is a reason behind the display of impunity by the illegal miners, leading to the fatality, and this has to do with the assurance they received when politicians came seeking their votes before the last polls in the country.
How many of them would lose their lives before they realise that when matters come to a head, they would be abandoned by their godfathers, which is beginning to play out.
To attempt disarming a state agent the way the deceased did is the height of imbecility and foolhardiness.
Stories about illegal mining and the associated challenges thereof are so common these days that they are on the verge of becoming normal occurrences. The day bloody engagements between law enforcement personnel and illegal miners become normal, the illegality would have degenerated into a full-fledged Mafia-like enterprise underpinned by sophisticated firearms in the hands of the actors.
Unless the growing trend is stopped, the traction it is gaining could spell disaster for the country and everybody, including the illegal miners, would pay dearly for the repercussions. We pray though that day never comes.
That every illegal mine has firearms within it indicates the growing sophistication of the enterprise. It is fueling the weapon trade in the country; we overlook this fact to the detriment of security in the country.
The recent arrest of a Warrant Officer in Kumasi when detectives feigned interest in the illegal purchase of the weapons and eventually picked him up is enough to send apprehension down the spines of security conscious Ghanaians.
We still have not been able to establish the source of these illegal weapons in the country, some of them not licensable to non-state actors. There are so many illegal small arms in the hands of persons in strife-torn areas of the country, and this poses a major challenge to national security.
Besides arresting illegal miners and destroying their enterprise, it is our position that security personnel deployed for the galamsey war take interest in the weapons in the possessions of the hoodlums.
Let us hope that the world does not one day reject blood-stained gold and others mined after polluting the sources of potable water.
