Editorial of Daily Searchlight of Tuesday, 18th October, 2022
District Managers of the Forest Services Division of the Forestry Commission (FC) who fail to promptly report illegal mining activities in forest reserves within their jurisdictions risk severe sanctions.
Mr John Allotey, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of FC, who issued the warning, said the Commission would no longer accept the excuse that District Managers were not aware of illegal activities in Forest reserves.
The CEO, who was addressing District Managers from mining districts at Akyawkrom in the Ejisu Municipality, urged the officers to step up their game as Managers of the reserves to clamp down on the menace or face sanctions.
The meeting, which was also attended by the Deputy Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Benito Owusu Bio, and the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Lands and Forestry, Mr Francis Manu-Adabo, was to deliberate on strategies to fight illegal mining in forest reserves.
“If you fail to see activities of illegal miners in the reserves and take the necessary steps to fight it, sanctions would be applied because the essence of being there would have been defeated,” he cautioned.
The Daily Searchlight believes that this announcement, though coming late, is the right decision.
The prime objective of the Forest Services Division of the Forestry Commission is to protect the flora and fauna that occur naturally in the wild, particularly forests.
That being the case, we believe that reports of illegal mining in forests in a testimony of a shocking lack of supervision by the division.
We believe that by this time, heads should have been made to fall in the department over the way and manner illegal mining has been allowed to grow so rampantly in Ghana’s forests.
That said we believe that the time is still apt to take action, and therefore, the announcement from Mr. Allotey should be accepted in good faith and acted upon with dispatch.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Monday, 17th October, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
