Director of Water Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Prof Mike Osei-Atweneboana ‘twitches’ at the extent of devastation done to Ghana’s water bodies by illegal mining activities otherwise known as ‘galamsey’.
Not even the US$ 3 billion IMF loan granted the country is enough to salvage the water bodies from the destructing impact of galamsey, Prof Mike Osei-Atweneboana says.
In an interaction with The Independent Ghana, he noted that the country risks an alarming prospect of expending significant financial resources if it decides to safeguard its water bodies from the devastating impact of illegal mining activities.
He, thus, has called for stringent measures to be taken in order to curb the menace, and also salvage Ghana’s water bodies as well as save the country from losing huge sums of monies in a bid to restore them.
“In terms of how much money the government needs to recover these water bodies, if you want to recover them just like that, the amount of money you’ll need to recover the water bodies, the country cannot envisage. It’s going to use huge sums of money.
“I wonder if I can (quantify it). The money we are even going in for from the IMF cannot even treat the water that we have here currently.
Ghana for many many years has been grappling with the ramifications of illegal mining, especially on the country’s arable lands, water bodies as well as its forest reserves.
The activities of illegal miners has resulted in the pollution of various water bodies including River Pra, Offin, Densu, etc.
It is estimated that the country loses US$ 2 billion to galamsey annually. The International Growth Centre (IGC), in 2017, estimated that Ghana needs $250 million to reclaim lands and water bodies affected by illegal mining (galamsey) activities in the Western Region.
Throwing more light on the subject, Professor Osei-Atweneboana intimated that Ghana does not need to spend huge sums of monies on trying to recover its water resources if small-scale or artisanal mining is temporarily banned and galamsey is put under check.
Recall that in 2017, a government ban was issued on small-scale mining, directed at both licensed and unlicensed miners. This was in efforts to mitigate the impact of these activities on the country’s natural resources as well as crackdown on illegal mining.
The Professor contended that Ghana’s turbid water bodies were regaining its value during this period. He, thus, wants the government to reintroduce the ban on small-scale or artisanal mining as it did in 2017 in order to help restore the water bodies.
“There’s always a way of treating it because the water will refresh or treat itself if mining is stopped and I must say that when the government put an embargo on mining sometime ago for about a year or so, and [we later] accessed our data on the quality of the water, it was relatively good. When galamsey was stopped, the water started cleaning Itself and we saw significant differences in the quality of water in terms of the turbidity and the chemical composition of the water.
“We may not have the money to treat the volumes of ( polluted ) water but if we put the right methods in place, we would not need to spend money on treating the water,” he said.