James Kwabena Bomfeh, popularly referred to as Kabila, says Ghanaians should treat the fight against galamsey as an individual and group responsibility because of what is at stake.

According to the politician cum social commentator, “we must finish galamsey or it will finish us,” the more reason why all hands are needed on deck to combat the scourge.

GhanaWeb monitored comments he submitted on the May 5 edition of Peace FM’s Kokrokoo programme, where he stated that the conversation around galamsey also needed to be broadened.

“If I had my way, we should always have a holistic discussion about this galamsey. This is because when we talk of galamsey, it is restricted to the activities of small scale illegal miners, who operate with no permit yet end up destroying our water bodies etc.”

He added that these galamsey miners are only a product of the legal mining companies and their actions and inactions: “… those who engage in illegal mining are a product of legal mining or of the excesses of legal mining.”

He identified that the genesis of galamsey was rooted in the way multinational companies treated communities and the lands on which they extracted their resources.

He bemoaned the deplorable state in which most mining towns have been plunged citing the instances of irreclaimable farmlands, abandoned pits and other challenges that residents continue to face even long after these companies move on.

Kabila submitted that it was high time government moved to cure some of these ills by having a broad discussion on mining and also applying legal means in enforcing all regulations related especially to galamsey.