A pit tragedy? It's part of being an illegal miner in Ghana

ACCRA - When some 40 miners became trapped at eastern Ghana's Nyanfoman-Noyem mine earlier this month, the bizarre truth is that it was seen as a normal occurrence that warranted no panic.

The belief is that deaths of illegal miners are sacrifices to the gods for more gold. Illegal miners will brush aside such accidents and continue their work.

So when rescue teams arrived in Nyanfoman-Noyem on August 14, they received a frosty reception. They were afraid retrieval of any corpse would attract the police and this would disrupt their business.

'The people did not cooperate. Luckily, we met one of the survivors who has been helpful,' said John Badoo, head of the rescue mission from AngloAshanti, a Ghanaian-South African mining company.

During the six days the rescue team was in the town, residents went about their work as normal. The illegal miners continued their work, oblivious of whether there was any death at all.

When the excavators of the rescue mission went to work, illegal miners were just too glad to collect the sand and look for gold. There were no tears shed for any colleagues trapped below.

In the end, no illegal miner was rescued and no corpse was retrieved when the recue mission was suspended after six days.

In an effort to control the operations of illegal miners and also collect revenue from them, they were required from 1989 to register and be given a permit.

No barrier

The Precious Minerals Company was also created for them to sell to the government. Under the law, prospectors are allowed to mine an area as long as they are registered and their operations do not conflict with the general activity of the area.

The law allows them to be engaged only in surface mining, as they do not have the equipment and know-how to undertake underground mining.

Ebenezer Sackey, Chief Mines Inspector, said the law imposes limitations on their operations as well, but most illegal prospectors ignore them.

'When small-scale gold mining was regularized, they were limited to a depth to which they can work. In the inception of regularizing it, it was thought that if the small scale gold miners were allowed to work on hard rocks, which involves using explosives, this could pose a problem,' he said.

'Most of them have not been trained in the use of explosives so to avoid all these problem, they were restricted to these very shallow depths. They were not to work deeper than 10 feet,' he said.

Large areas have been degraded by the illegal miners, who do not reclaim the land as they move along. In some towns rich in diamonds or gold, there is no barrier to where they can dig - schools, cemeteries and even houses.

At the gold mining town of Prestea in the Western Region, dust levels are dangerously above the recommended figures.

As of last June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was quoted as saying although safety levels are fixed at 0.07 grams per cubic metre, the level is 0.17 grams per cubic metre in the town.

The effect of that rise in dust levels is asthma and TB. But according to Ransford Sekyi of the EPA, illegal operators are unwilling to accept the agency's advice.

'When we held a public forum recently, we were nearly chased out. It was the military that saved us,' he said.

The creation of a new class of wealthy people from illegal mining is breeding anarchy in those areas.

Prostitutes flock to there with the attendant risks of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS. The use of drugs in these areas is rampant and there is general lawlessness.

Source: khaleejtimes.com