Renowned Ghanaian clergyman, His Eminence Cardinal Peter Appiah Turkson, has lamented Ghana’s failure to stop the menace of illegal small-scale mining, popularly called galamsey.

Speaking in an interview on TV3’s The Big Issue, shared on X on Sunday, October 13, 2024, the Ghanaian prelate and cardinal of the Catholic Church pointed out that galamsey is not only destroying the country’s forest reserves and water bodies but is also endangering its economy.

Cardinal Turkson, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican, added that if the government fails to stop illegal mining, Ghana would veer far from the vision of its first President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, and edge toward becoming a failed state.

“If the status quo remains, we'll get to a stage, to put it bluntly, of a failed state. Because, I mean, we've depended on cocoa production. We are basically an economy that was based on mining and agriculture. Kwame Nkrumah, in his wisdom, asked miners to go down and get the minerals while leaving the surface for farming, so we could feed ourselves.

“That wisdom has been lost. We're not going down to get the minerals, and we’re not preserving the surface. We are taking the vegetation, removing the topsoil, and leaving potholes. His vision, according to me, was far more correct than the present or whatever,” he said.

He added, “If we continue this way, we’ll lose our vegetation in the era of climate change, which is something we cannot afford. We lose our topsoil, and food production becomes an issue.”

BAI/OGB

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