The families are paying the price over the long term
Companies have been accused of paying whole villages paltry amounts of cash for lands and of using brutal security tactics to protect gold plots. Villagers say mines and the cyanide liquid used to extract gold from the rock is spreading disease.
Ghana is the second biggest producer of gold in Africa after South Africa. Most of its gold is exported to or gets refined in Europe, according to the Ghana Chamber of Mines.
Some of the west African nation’s mines are hundreds of square kilometres in size and as big as a small country.
However, it is often Ghanaian families – delighted with the cash pressed into their palms by companies who buy their farms – who suddenly find themselves desolate and without means of providing for their families in the long-term.
Many turn their hands to illegally mining on company lands. Faced with no fruit or vegetable plots, parents, as well as their children, risk their lives.
They become ‘galamsey’. The term, originating from the phrase “gather and sell”, refers commonly in Ghana to illegal and small scale gold miners.
It is estimated there are at least 300,000 galamsey in Ghana and possibly up to half a million.
Concern over the country’s large-scale mining and government negligence is largely led by a small independent NGO called the Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining. Its members have received death threats.
According to the association’s director, Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, mining companies are ripping off landowners.
“They might offer them just 8 cedis (€4) for a decade-old cocoa tree and it goes like that. Little amounts for their plants and farm.”
But it’s the environmental horrors being created by companies, says the association, which are the most worrying. Huge mountains of waste rock fence in whole villages and block up water supplies, says the NGO.
Security firms hired by companies often “brutalise” illegal miners with dogs and weapons, claimed Mr Owusu-Koranteng.
The Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining wants mining-free zones established, a moratorium on mining licences and an end to the mass displacement of villagers by companies.
“What are future generations going to do when it (gold) runs out? By the time it comes to cleaning up the mess, gold mining companies will not be here,” said its director.
But the industry says it is the illegal miners who are causing the most damage. Ghana Chamber of Mines director public affairs Ahmed Nantogmah said: “At night there are sometimes hundreds of people hiding, ready to dig trenches.
“Men and children pound the stone.
“There are a lot of accidents,” he said.
“Illegal miners sometimes come armed. So security has to push them out. People talk about mining companies with arms. But people have a right to protect their investment. If they don’t, where will the workers go?”
The industry say companies pay a ‘reclamation bond’ which obliges them to clean up pits once they leave an area. Harmful effects of cyanide are also minimised, the industry says, once the erosive chemical is exposed to sunlight.
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