I won’t protect you if you’re caught complicit in galamsey fight – Akufo-Addo warns MMCDEs

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has cautioned his Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) that he would not protect any of them if there is ample evidence against them sabotaging the national fight against illegal small-scale mining popularly known as galamsey.

At a meeting with the 90 MMDCEs in areas across the country where mining activities take place, today, Wednesday, 6 October 2022, in Kumasi in the Ashanti region, the President said he cannot wage a war at the national level for his appointees to compromise it at the local level.

“You’re my representatives in each of your metropolis, municipalities and districts. You’re the representatives of the president. It cannot be that the president at the national level is waging a war against galamsey and you at the local level, my representatives are compromising that fight, that cannot work,” Nana Akufo-Addo told his appointees.

Indeed, he added: “I want you to know that this is a struggle that I take very seriously and I will not be in a position to protect anybody against whom evidence is marshalled to show their complicity, I won’t do it.”

The president after the warning went into a close session with the MMDCEs to discuss ways to stop the ongoing galamsey menace that has destroyed water bodies and forest covers, threatening the very existence of the citizenry.

Earlier, Nana Akufo-Addo had met with the National House of Chiefs where he asked chiefs in the country to help take partisan politics out of the fight against galamsey.

“Since I took office on the 7th of January 2017, nearly six years ago, I have made it the central feature of my presidency, to lead the efforts to rid our country of this menace, which we all now call galamsey. Indeed, it was an important aspect of my inaugural address of that day”, the president noted.

He told the chiefs, however: “It has not been easy, it has not been popular and we have not got the immediate results that I was looking for”.

Indeed, he added, “in the last elections of 2020, my stance on the issue, cost my party and I significant losses in the mining communities”.

“It turned out that my statement that I was putting my presidency on the line in the fight against galamsey, was neither bombastic nor recklessness; it was the simple truth”, the president told the gathering of chiefs.

He said the menace persists despite several measures put in place against it by his government in the past six years.

“We have tried many initiatives, including that of the community mining scheme and the establishment of the new legal regime for dealing with the perpetrators of this phenomenon, which has imposed severe sanctions on those Ghanaians and foreigners convicted of illegal mining but still, we have not won the fight”, he bemoaned.

“It is obvious that if we are to win the fight, you [chiefs] and I are to take the lead to collaborate closely to do so and that is why I’m here today”, the president said.