Former Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Professor Frimpong Boateng, says while burning Changfan machines seem like a plausible way to halt illegal mining, it is only a stop gap measure.

According to him, Chang fans are easy to replace thus their destruction will only stop work for a short period of time till a new one is acquired by the illegal miners.

This he says was the reason why the IMCIM under his leadership not only carted away the Changfans of illegal miners, but all other machines they worked with as well as their floating platforms.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said doing so had made the fight against galamsey successful.

“Even there we worked with the small scale miners association, they had a taskforce, we were able to displace all the people working in the water bodies, those who were polluting the water bodies. So when we came there we took away all their equipment and carried them away, we were not burning them on the water bodies. So each set of equipment will cost about 25 to 30,000 cedis.

“So if we took everything away it was a lot of money that they lost but then if you go and burn the Changfan sitting on floating platforms you have not done anything because the next day they can bring other machines. But if you can take the floating platforms themselves away then you’ll be successful. This is what we did. And so it was very very successful,” he said.

However, what he had not anticipated was that those affected by the seizures were not all small scale miners.

According to Prof. Boateng, some of these illegal miners belonged to big companies that were sponsored by big people in quarters of influence.

He says, the agitations of these big people are what had finally derailed the great progress the IMCIM had been making in the fight against galamsey.

“But unknown to me there were people behind, big companies and they started agitating and I didn’t know. So that was where we started having problems and when we noticed that there were a lot of people also engaged who were not small scale miners but people who had influence and they were engaged in this thing it was a problem.

“So that happened till I was ordered by the Chief of Staff to write a report on the fight against illegal mining and suggest a way forward and that was why I wrote that report and sent it to the chief of staff on the 19^th of March 2021.

He added that his report to the president was not meant for public consumption, it was only to aid the president facilitate a larger dialogue for a way forward.

“The report wasn’t meant for public consumption, at all. It was meant for the President’s attention. If he had read it, he could have called me or those I mentioned in the report and then we’ll discuss it and see a way of solving this problem,” he said.