National Security operatives have arrested two people, including the owner of an illegal mining site cited close to an Agenda 111 hospital project site at Adansi Asokwa in the Ashanti Region.
Site owner, Yussif Ibrahim, was picked up after one of his employees, arrested during an operation, identified him as his boss.
The arrest comes as the Regional Security Council reclaims the site degraded by illegal miners.
Illegal miners set up their camp less than 5 metres behind the walls of the Adansi Asokwa Agenda 111 Hospital.
The Ashanti Regional Security Council moved in immediately after news of the activities of the miners surfaced in the media in the first week of July.
National Security, acting on the orders of REGSEC, has been supervising the reclamation of the mined pits, which can be compared to the size of 30 standard football fields.
The reclamation process has successfully restored over 80 percent of the degraded land.
But despite the presence of national security operatives, some illegal miners were still found operating.
This situation led to the arrest of one person who later led operatives to the arrest of his boss.
Deputy Regional Security Coordinator Alhaji Abdellah Umar tells journalists that investigations into the operations of the gang have begun as the two are questioned.
Alhaji Abdellah Umar
He first defended why the national security embarked on the move to clamp down on the activities of the illegal miners.
“We know it is very close to the Agenda 111 [project], and when we came, we still saw [illegal mining] as the reclamation was going on; we’ve still seen some around. It means when we are not careful, in the next few days or weeks, we will realise [illegal mining] on the premises of the Agenda 111 itself.”
According to him, no stone will be left unturned in efforts to reclaim mined-out lands.
“The land we are standing on now is to be given a second chance, because some few weeks ago, it was heavily degraded by illegal miners—those who you are, who you are claiming we are treating with kid gloves or whatever. As you can attest to with me, whilst we were here, we picked some of the workers, or some of the boys who were still around trying to work on the land, to the RCC. So, that is part of the fight for getting our lands back, and I can assure you we are going to take them on, especially the illegal miners who did that wrong in this place.”
One of the suspects arrested at the site
Meanwhile, REGSEC is partnering with the Logeist EcoReclaim Initiative and Agricentric Ventures to fully restore the degraded land.
Officials say the reclaimed land would be put to economic use in time as a public-private partnership.
“Our involvement in this exercise is to conduct what is called ‘microbial ecological research’, where we use bacteria or inoculants—microbial inoculants or bacteria, let me put it that way. We cultivate bacteria; we apply them to the soil to break down or make the chemicals in the soil lose their bioavailability,” says Gideon Nyameson, Chief Executive Officer, Agricentric Ventures.
According to him, his organisation will introduce a social inclusivity programme to involve members of catchment communities.
“We want to do this—and then after that, we apply carbon or activated biochar in order to make the soil productive again,” he said.
“And we want to do this because we’ve realised that anytime there is—anytime we do the reclamation, and sometimes you do planting, you even plant trees, and you leave, they come back, and they start the mining—the illegal mining activities again. So this time, what we want to do is to introduce something called ‘social inclusivity’, where after doing the reclamation, we treat the soil and apply the bacteria and all the necessary elements to remediate the soil. And after that, we plant shrubs or oil-yielding plants.”
On his part, Group General Manager of Logesist EcoReclaim Initiative, Benjamin Karikari Dwira, led a team to assess and observe the situation.
He revealed his organisation is partnering with Agricentric, CSIR, and FORIG to make the degraded land fertile again.
“We are doing everything that we can to make sure that we have a solution for it. But as it stands now, I can tell you, per observation, this place is a place that we must move to and sit in earnest to make sure that we do something about it.”
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