For years, Ghana has fought illegal small-scale mining — galamsey — with task forces, soldiers, drones and press conferences.
And for years, galamsey has won. Rivers remain brown. Forest reserves remain scarred.
Farmlands remain poisoned with mercury. Communities remain divided between those who profit from illegal mining and those who suffer its consequences.
It is time to admit a painful truth: the current system is not working because it was never designed to work at the scale of the problem.
That is the central message of a new study by researchers from Ghana and Canada that deserves the serious attention of government, Parliament and all of us who drink from our rivers and eat from our farms.
The researchers — led by Dr John Boakye-Danquah of the University of Saskatchewan and Globe and Systems Consulting, with Professor Yaw Agyemang Boafo of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies, University of Ghana, Dr Felicitas Egunyu of the University of Waterloo, and Mfah Amadu of SysGlo Ghana Limited — have made a recommendation: empower, resource and mandate Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to oversee all small-scale mining in their jurisdictions.
Their reason is blunt. Regulators such as the Minerals Commission and the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) lack the local data and the capacity to monitor hundreds of scattered mining sites continuously.
They are headquartered in Accra and regional capitals.
Galamsey is in the valleys, in the forest fringes, in the cocoa farms, in the riverbeds — places that central officers visit occasionally, if at all.
The assemblies, by contrast, are the only state institutions with a daily presence in mining communities.
They have the local knowledge, the staff on the ground and the authority over land use needed to oversee mining site by site.
They know who owns which farm, which chief gave which concession, which road leads to which pit, and which young men disappeared into the bush last night.
Why, then, have we kept them on the sidelines?
Part of the answer is the way mining governance was centralised. Licences are issued in Accra. Monitoring is supposed to happen from Accra.
Enforcement is launched from Accra.
The district is informed, if at all, after the damage is done.
It is a top-down system for a bottom-up problem.
The result is predictable. Hundreds of small sites, spread across dozens of districts, cannot be policed by a handful of officers with limited vehicles, limited fuel, and no real-time information.
By the time a report reaches Accra, the miners have moved, the river is already polluted, and the pit has collapsed on someone’s child.
The researchers are not calling for MMDAs to issue mining licences or to replace the Minerals Commission.
They are calling for what should have been obvious from the start: a mandate to monitor and report on all mining in their districts, with training and a reliable budget to do it properly.
Crucially, the study stresses the need to make District Mining Committees (DMCs) functional, with clear terms of reference, their own budgets, regular meetings, and quarterly reporting.
This is not a new idea on paper. DMCs exist in law. In practice, many are moribund — no meetings, no budget, no authority, no minutes.
They have become another committee that exists only when a minister visits.
The researchers are right: if DMCs are to work, they must be given teeth and money.
A committee without a budget is a debating club.
A committee without a mandate is a photo opportunity.
Critics will say district assemblies are themselves politicised, that some officials benefit from galamsey, that giving them more power could entrench corruption.
Those fears are legitimate, but they are not a reason to do nothing.
They are a reason to design the system well.
We must also be honest about resources.
MMDAs are already overstretched, underfunded, and often unable to pay for basic services.
To ask them to monitor mining without money is to set them up to fail.
Government must match mandate with money — from mineral royalties, from the Minerals Development Fund, and from the national budget.
Galamsey is not just an environmental problem. And it is a governance problem.
When citizens see that the state cannot stop illegal mining in their own backyard, they lose faith in the state itself.
Ghana has tried the centralised, militarised approach.
It has not worked.
The researchers from Ghana and Canada are offering a different path — one rooted in our own decentralised system, in local knowledge, and in daily presence.
If we want to win the war against galamsey, we must fight it where it happens — in the districts, site by site, day by day.
