Obrempong Akwasi Amo Kyeretwie, Chief of Akyem-Abirem in the Eastern Region, has lauded the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) and the Inspector General of Police (IGP), for the relentless onslaught against illegal mining, which has led to cleaner water bodies in the country.

“Our rivers are clean now and we appreciate your efforts executed through the Operation Vanguard Task Force,” the Chief who is also the Acting Gyasehene of the Kotoku Traditional Area, remarked.

This was when General Obed Boamah Akwa, the CDS and Mr David Asante Apeatu, the IGP, visited personnel of the Eastern Region Forward Operating Base (FOB) at Akyem-Abirem.

The CDS and the IGP, took turns to thank the Chiefs of the Kotoku Traditional Area for their support and called for more collaboration in the fight to flush out the illegal miners to bounce back water bodies and their biodiversity.

Later at separate durbars with personnel of the Task force in the Ashanti, Western and Eastern Regions, all illegal mining areas, the CDS and IGP disclosed that more Naval personnel as well as Engineers from the Ghana Army and Marine Police would join the Taskforce to help flush out all illegal miners operating on water bodies

The upsurge in mad rush for gold over a decade ago led to thousands of illegal miners, including some foreign nationals, mostly Chinese, invading the gold deposit belt of the country to prospect for gold, giving rise to an imminent threat of Ghana’s water resources running dry in a few years.

Through an illegal Chang-fa technology, an alluvial gold mining equipment, usually referred to by locals in the mining areas as ‘toutou’, involving digging for gold in the river bed, most of the water sources for millions of the citizenry, such as River Pra, Ankobra, Birim, Tano, Bia, Offin and Pra, became heavily polluted.

The pollution of water sources due to such activities also largely took a toll on potable water supply to an extent that water treatment plants had to be shut down one after the other almost every time by the Ghana Water Company Limited, in charge of the country’s water treatment and distribution.

However, through the assiduous work of a military/police task force, ‘Operation Vanguard’, about 2,044, called ‘Chang-fa,’ which used to be floating on Ghanaian rivers, have been immobilized and intercepted in these three Regions.

Information from the Ghana Water Company Limited has also confirmed that, the turbidity of our water bodies has improved.

The use of more chemicals to treat water that goes to individual homes, has also been reduced.