Private legal practitioner Thaddeus Sory has called for the revocation of some mining licenses of illegal small-scale mining (galamsey) operators in the country.
According to him, the only way to protect humanity, especially Ghanaians, from the devastating effects of galamsey is to take radical action.
“Galamsey is polluting our water bodies, it is destroying our flora and fauna, and it is creating calamitous health problems. Who should come and save us? Are we the only ones with gold? Why are we the only victims of this gold?
“So, we all shout, Stop galamsey! Burn all the machinery and equipment used for galamsey! Repeal the law! Galamseyers should be handed punitive long imprisonment terms!
“Cacophonous nonsense! We are suddenly behaving like gold was discovered yesterday. Over 600 years ago, when some people called our land the ‘land of gold,’ it was because our people were already trading in gold.
“They always knew the value of gold. The gold our ancestors traded was not extracted by destroying nature,” he said.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Sory questioned why gold was mined responsibly in the past without major environmental consequences, yet today, mining activities have led to severe destruction.
In his post titled “Hypocritical Lamentations,” he lamented that gold mining is destroying the environment, especially water bodies, and causing health problems.
“God made enough available to our grandfathers on the surface so that there was no need to dig up the earth and destroy everything just for gold alone.
“By leaving a chunk of it underground, God was warning us about the consequences of going down there to extract it. It will destroy every other aspect of nature. So even when we started mining, we appreciated the importance of flora and fauna. By law, we created forests and forbade people from even hunting in them for food. I say, even for food, we could not enter the forest reserves.
“Then we allow others to go in there to mine, and now we are complaining? About what? What were we thinking? Things buried and covered or kept away are meant to remain there. Exposing them has tragic consequences, that is why ill luck is kept in a box, in a special box known as Pandora’s Box,” he added.
He continued, “The Good Book asks, what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? But you see, I respect that man who gains the whole world and loses his soul. We lack his wisdom. We are gaining only gold, not the world, and yet we are doomed to lose our souls.
“The only way to save our souls is to get radical. Stop not only galamsey, revoke a lot of mining leases, maybe all of them, at least for a while. We need to render an unqualified apology to God as a nation.
“Why? Because we have believed that of all the other beautiful and valuable things He has given us in nature, gold is better than all, and that it is worth throwing everything else away in pursuit of it.”
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