Former environment minister, Prof. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng wrote in a report submitted to the presidency that illegal small-scale mining (galamsey) had ravaged parts of the Eastern Region affecting the president's private residence in his village.

The 2021 report by the then chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) listed a number of top government and party officials complicit in galamsey activities or those alleged to have frustrated the work of the committee.

The report alleged that a local youth organizer of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) had engaged in galamsey near the president's house till it affected a garden in the residence.

Prof. Frimpong-Boateng added that he dispatched a team that verified the incident and without telling the president went ahead to reclaim the land and vegetate the area.

Reacting to the specific allegation in a statement dated Monday, April 24, 2023, the NPP's Abuakwa South Constituency executives dismissed the allegation citing factual inaccuracies.

The statement co-signed by the Communication Officer and Constituency Secretary of the Abuakwa South NPP, Felix Nyarko Acheampong and Julius Okyere, pointed out that the president's residence did not have a garden at all let alone it being impacted by galamsey.

It also disputed the possibility that galamsey could be carried out at the location of the residence.

The statement read in part, that the President’s house is not “obscured as it is closely surrounded by many other houses” and for that matter to “suggest that an illegal mining operation has taken place near the walled house to the extent that it affected parts of a supposed garden in the house, only lives much to be desired about what method at all was used for such operation."

To this end, the party disclosed that the President does not even have a garden at his Kyebi residence therefore, for the Professor to state that a section of his garden was affected “is nothing but palpable falsehood.”

“But to have continued to say that he personally followed up to see with his very eyes, the supposed incident, simply casts a huge slur on the integrity of both the Former Minister and his work as Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee,” it stressed.

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SARA