Government spokesperson who serves as the Media Relations Officer for the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Paa Kwesi Schandorf has stated that Ghana’s fight against galamsey will continue to struggle unless the two major political sides stop using the issue for political advantage.
Schandorf said both the government and opposition must acknowledge their role in politicising the illegal mining debate and agree to treat it as a national problem.
“If we don’t and we are continuously politicising the issue and involving the regular political discourse, we will not get anywhere,” he said on Joy Prime.
He rejected the idea that only the current government should admit that the issue has been politicised.
According to him, such an admission would be incomplete because the opposition is also still involved in the political debate surrounding galamsey.
“The reason I’m saying it’s maybe a one-sided admission is that even the opposition party currently, all right, they too are still involved in the politics,” he said.
Schandorf said neither political party should use the conduct of the other as justification for continuing the same approach.
“We cannot say that, well, in the past, some people politicised it, so it’s our turn to,” he said.
Instead, he wants both sides to acknowledge their mistakes and move beyond them.
“We have to de-escalate the politics and come to a place where we all say that, yes, admittedly, maybe we did some things that were not right. Now, let’s forge ahead and let’s treat it as a national calamity,” he said.
He believes the need for such an approach is becoming more urgent because of the scale of the problem and the environmental destruction already recorded.
“We already have a very serious situation on our hands, but we might get to a point where nobody will be able to contain it again,” he warned.
For Schandorf, whoever starts the admission is less important than both sides eventually reaching the same position.
“The real point is whether party A does it first or party B does it first, we should come to that point of honesty,” he said.
