A Kumasi High Court on Thursday ruled against four Chinese nationals involved in illegal mining activities on a 40-acre land of Obuasi-based Seidu Fanzia School. 

The court ruled against the four - Wen Shi Li, Huang Shen Jun, Li De Hao and Lan Hai Song - for using fraudulent means to validate their stay and working without the required permits. The court, therefore, ordered their deportation.

However, the plaintiffs will appeal the ruling by the High Court on their deportation as they are unsatisfied with the Court’s failure to grant some reliefs, including monetary compensation and reclamation of land destroyed through illegal mining.

They have therefore filed for a stay of execution of the High Court ruling.

The motion is expected to be moved before the court on June 15, 2020.

Kwapiahene, Nana Gyamera Oyiakwan, one of the plaintiffs, commended the Presiding judge, His Lordship Justice Emmanuel Senyo Amedahe for the professional handling of the case.

“I have been to several courts but so far this is one of the best courts I have ever witnessed. The judge in charge of High Court 1 Kumasi discharged his duties as a patriotic Ghanaian.

"He performed his duties professionally just that the judgment in part did not favour the developers. As a result, the developers want to appeal against the judgment for stay of execution.”

Back in Obuasi, the news team observed extensive damage caused by activities of the illegal Chinese immigrants and their Ghanaian collaborators in at the plush airport residential area.

The distance between the last building and the mining site is about 20-meters.

Apart from the massive destruction caused to the environment, water bodies have also been destroyed by the activities of the miners. Particularly, in diverting the course of the Fena and Aponopon streams.

Locals who depend on the streams for vegetable farming lament they are unable to use the heavily polluted water from the streams for their farming activities.

41-year-old Kwabena Kwakye, an Adaase-based vegetable producer, is one of the affected farmers. He has been forced to turn to palm wine tapping.

“I am into vegetable farming. My speciality is tomatoes, garden eggs and okra production. The emergence of illegal mining has destroyed all our water bodies in this area. We can no longer farm because our rivers are polluted,” he said in Twi.

“As a result of the pollution, I have now turned a palm wine tapper,” Mr. Kwakye revealed.

The pollution means farmers are unable to use water from the streams for watering and chemical applications.

“River Fena was our source of water for watering and chemical application activities. You only see brownish, milky but polluted water when you use it to water vegetables. It is no longer useful.”

The mining activities of the Chinese and their Ghanaian collaborators have also affected an oil palm plantation under the 1 District 1 Factory project being undertaken by Leapalm Oil Company at Adaase. 

Officials say 20 acres of land prepared for the plantation were seized by the illegal miners, disrupting its planting programme.

“We had already prepared the land for planting when all of a sudden, the illegal miners seized the land. I met several excavators on site here.

"I did all I could to drive them away but the miners wouldn’t go. They operated under armed guards,” Kwame Boadi, a Foreman at Leapalm Oil Company recounted to JoyNews.