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The Ghana Gold Rush, as seen on television
E. Ablorh-Odjidja
October 29, 2012
If no official of the government of Ghana saw “The
Jungle Gold Rush” series that was shown on the Discovery
Channel television, starting October 26, 2012, we
suggest the government order copies for them to view
now.
The show was about the abundance of cheap gold in Ghana,
depicted in such an embarrassing manner that it must
require the immediate attention of the government's
action.
Historically, Ghana has been a major source of the
world’s gold supply.
Gold, while lucrative to the economy, has also
damaged Ghana to some extent.
It was gold that brought the first Europeans.
Names like the Gold Coast and Elmina were the
verbal footprints left from the gold rush of earlier
times.
That rush was centuries ago. This time, it is the
Chinese that is heading the rush, along with the shoddy
environmentally destructive small-scale gold mining
practice called Galamsey.
The “The Jungle Gold Rush” television series presents a
tragedy. It
is about profit-seeking adventurers, ruthlessly wasting
and wrecking the environment in Ghana, while at the same
time robbing locals of the job enrichment opportunities
reserved by law for Ghanaians.
Out of this show comes the depiction of the Chinese
attitude of impudence, aggression, and assault on our
sovereignty, including disrespect for the locals.
This must be a major concern for any sensible
government that cares for its people.
The protagonists are two male characters from Utah, USA,
who are broke, in debt, and in need of an enterprise
with the potential for a quick profit. That was when
Ghana and gold prospecting as a business came to their
mind.
With that as a business plan, they were able to raise
capital in the US for a mining concession in Ghana.
They arrived in Ghana only to find out that the claim
they thought belonged to them was now being worked on by
a gang of armed Chinese!
How both the Americans and the Chinese managed to
acquire any claims, and on what visas or licenses to
operate as small-scale miners in Ghana, should be the
troubling questions for the government to consider.
That our government should be oblivious to our
historically copious resource of gold is one thing.
But it is completely another matter for it to
hand over the same resource to foreigners to siphon this
wealth away.
The lesson is there for government officials, directly
or remotely connected to the industry.
They must learn that the world already knows at
this late date in the 21st century that we haven’t
learned much from our history.
The Chinese have gone wild, operating brazenly in fields
that ought to be the preserve for locals, while village
chiefs cower in fear!
“Behind every illegal Chinese operator, we are looking
at an opinion leader, a chief, a farmer, a landowner or
somebody who then sublets it to the Chinese for these
illegal activities,” an official from the Ghana Chamber
of Mines said to Voice America.
The Americans in the documentary are only two and almost
absent in the country's entire small scale gold mining
industry.
Comparatively, the Chinese are in the hordes; despoiling
farms, environments, and communities alike, with nothing
else in mind other than to find as much gold as they
can.
Outside prospecting for gold, there is not a single
enterprise in Ghana where their presence and dominance
are not felt.
They are the dominant force in civil engineering and the
construction industries. Highway projects financed by
the American government for Ghanaians have even gone to
the Chinese.
The substantial financial and peripheral benefits from
these funded projects drained right out of Ghana to
China.
The Chinese have also a hold on the future of our little
oil finds because the finds are already mortgaged for
debts owed to them.
Ghana now is depended on the Chinese for vararious
commodities and imports. The purchases come
in the form of labor, expertise, and material supplies
which go to compromise Ghana's industrial ability to
compete.
And as if all the above are not enough, the Chinese are
now on our farms, destroying lands that once used to be
long-term profitable cocoa farms to operate short-term
extractive small-scale mining operations.
“As global gold prices climb amid economic uncertainty
in Europe, Ghana is facing an influx of illegal
small-scale miners from China … The operations are
raising concern over environmental damage ….” Bloomberg
News reported.
"The easy influx of foreign miners was due to lax
industry regulation; which to those who know means the
controllers are “paid” to look the other way."
In the Ashanti region recently, 101 Chinese minors, were
found at a galamsey site and were detained by the police
in Ghana. One of them died.
No one asked what Chinese minors were doing so
far from home, or who brought them to Ghana and how?
The Foreign Affairs Minister of Ghana, Alhaji Mohammed
Mumuni, when confronted with the query, had only a
sketchy response.
He said, “In some areas, there is some kind of unholy
alliance between some of these aliens and our citizens,”
and that “we need to work hard to stamp it out,”
Bloomberg News reported on September 20, 2012.
In the case of the 101 Chinese minors, the Chinese
government had a robust concern.
It allowed the Ghanaian public to know her
concern.
It said to entire Ghana, the Chinese government “will be
closely monitoring the situation to ensure correct
treatment of its nationals by the Ghanaian
authorities..” and “has requested that the rights and
safety of the detainees are observed; while also
encouraging the Ghanaian government to punish those
found guilty, and to compensate those found to be
innocent victims.”
Suddenly, one illegal small-scale Chinese miner is dead
in Ghana and he becomes an innocent victim. Was there a
similar reaction from this Chinese government for the
thousands of her citizens who were murdered at the
Tiananmen Square rising of 1989 - - on citizens, who had
only come to protest for justice?
The Chinese show more concern for its illegal citizens
in Ghana but none for the damage these abusers of rights
cause in villages and farms in Ghana with their unlawful
mining activities. And galling still is the fact that
the same Chinese government would never tolerate any of
the abuses inflicted here by its citizens, or any other,
back at home in China.
The retributions there, like those exhibited in
Tiananmen Square, would be brutal.
But in Ghana, the same Chinese government sees nothing
wrong with its citizens behaving badly in the mining
sector. It
is even brash enough to issue open threats to our
government.
They advocate for them to stay and continue the abuses.
But how difficult or complex is it for Ghanaian
officials to detect illegal mining activities in our
villages?
It should be easy until you find out that official
inaction may have been induced by corruption.
There is some money to be made by looking the
other way, starting with visa issuances, and licensing
operation certifications.
Meanwhile, our farming regions are being traumatized in
the face of the government’s inaction.
Dr. Dominic Dobbin, the District Health Director from
the region where the 101 Chinese illegal operators were,
described foreign Galamsey operators as a menace to
health.
He said, “Various health facilities in the area have
recorded about three hundred teenage pregnancies…. high
abortion cases while HIV/AIDS in the area are on the
increase….” because of the Galamsey menace.
Dr. Dobbin attributed teenage pregnancies and abortion
cases to Chinese Galamsey operators. “They had more
money to spend and they “go about chasing small girls.."
he said.
These are problems that must worry our government first,
regardless of threats from China.
The Chinese, like all exploiters, are only interested in
what they can extract from Ghana to send back to China,
while our government looks on idle, immobilized to act
in its interest because of the huge Chinese loans
already taken.
As embarrassing as watching the documentary was, we
should hope that the same embarrassment would force our
government to act early to save us from being the
laughingstock of the world.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com,
Washington, DC, October 29, 2012.
Permission to publish: Please
feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits,
unedited. If posted on a website, email a copy of the
web page to publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at
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