The parliamentary candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for Nabdam, Charles Taleog Ndanbon, has descended heavily on the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Minerals Commission, Martin Kwaku Ayisi, in relation to a comment he made in Parliament earlier this week.
“The delay in granting licences is creating the problem. When you don’t give them the licence, they will go and do it illegally. If you don’t issue the licences, the reverse will be the case,” Ayisi told Parliament’s Government Assurances Committee on Monday.
He made the remark in reference to the destruction being done to the environment through illegal mining activities, informally referred to as galamsey, in Ghana.
But his comment did not sit well with Taleog, a notable small-scale miner who doubles as the Upper East Regional Organiser of the governing NPP.
Taleog told Media Without Borders that Ayisi himself was to blame for the delay small-scale miners encountered when they applied to the commission for licence or sought licence renewal.
Citing himself as an example, Taleog said he applied for licence renewal in August, 2020, for his small-scale mining firm, Yenyeya Mining Group, but the commission had failed to renew the licence from then to date despite paying all the fees demanded from him.
“It would have been better if he had kept quiet. Is he not ashamed of himself? People apply for a licence, you don’t give. People apply for renewal, you don’t do it. I paid everything, did he renew my licence?
“Those in charge of the commission are the ones causing all this mess, all these needless troubles. You put in your applications, they won’t do it; they will sit on it,” he stated.
“Ayisi coming out to say such a thing is shameful. He is the one who is supposed to issue the licence and if you sit on people’s applications, what do you expect them to do?” he added.
Proposal to decentralise licence issuance, renewal
Taleog also suggested that issuance and renewal of mining licences should be decentralised.
He said doing so would not only bring the licensing and renewal procedures closer to applicants but also would help to do away with the tediousness that reportedly compelled people to mine illegally.
“You have to go through a tedious way to get a licence. I wish that they bring it to the district level. The licence should be given at the district level. It should be processed and issued at the district level. Currently you process at the district level but the licence is issued in Accra.
“The district processes the document and sends it to Accra. Even while it is in Accra, you have to follow up. If you don’t follow up, the document would be lying down there. When the commission finishes, it then sends it to the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources to append his signature to it. You can see how tedious it is. You can see how some people are forced to do illegal mining,” he stated.
There is a recording where the Minerals Commission’s CEO issued a strong warning to Taleog after the small-scale miner wrote a letter to the commission expressing his frustration about the delay in renewing his licence.
He tells Taleog in that recording he finds the language of the letter “very, very disrespectful and insulting” and warns that “under no circumstance should you write that kind of language to anybody in the Minerals Commission again.”
“You have no right to use that kind of silly language. Do you understand that? Sometimes, these delays are not deliberate. It may be either the file has gone somewhere or something is happening.
“We will respond to the letter and find out what the problem is. But next time you write a letter with that kind of language, you will see the other side of us,” the CEO told Taleog with a tone of anger in his voice.
The CEO did not comment when Media Without Borders contacted him on Wednesday for his side of the story before press time.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
