The Akyemansa District Assembly in the Eastern Region is considering training some selected youth in swimming to complement the fight against illegal mining in the District.
According to the District Chief Executive, Paul Asamoah, the decision has become necessary due to the influx of illegal alluvial miners in the district polluting major river bodies, however, due to the unavailability of skilled swimmers and divers, many operations carried out for the arrest of the suspects have not been entirely successful.
He however said a few chanfai types of equipment were confiscated and burnt.
“We didn’t have such activities in our District as the rate we are experiencing recently. so anytime we have the information we send the police to clamp down on them. The chanfai operators do is that they fix their machine in the middle of the river and when you go there and you are not good at swimming you will be drowned so we sent a police team to the site and anytime they go they just dive and run away”.
According to the DCE, “It is difficult to get the divers. They come from a long distance. Sometimes by the time you get ready to get them they also going somewhere so I will appeal that if the fight against chanfai and their activities to be successful we have to get dedicated youth that will be trained to become divers because they are the people who can help us to fight the chanfai. If you go with security men who cannot swim you will achieve nothing but if you have divers you can use them to bring the machines out to burn it and once we keep burning the machines it will drive them away”
In a related development, the Bekwai Circuit Court in Ashanti Region on Thursday, July 1, 2021, remanded 22 illegal miners into Police Custody to reappear two weeks later.
The accused persons were arrested by a joint Security Taskforce numbering about a hundred comprising the Police, Immigration, Fire, Prisons, and the Forestry Commission led by the District Chief Executive for Akrofuom, Maurice Jonas Woode.
A total of 24 were arrested engaging in Sukuma Forest reserve at Pewodie near Grumesa in the Adansi Akrofuom District of the Ashanti Region but two were established to be farmers mistakenly arrested by the team.
The accused persons have been using chanfai machine and gold detectors to mine in river Nana Pomah which take its headwaters from the forest reserve.
According to Palmer Aikens, Assistant District Manager of the Forestry Commission, the illegal miners had erected tents which they sleep in the forest reserve under their concealed mining activities.
He said over 200 tents were identified and destroyed. Also, 16 Chanfai machines were set on fire, 104 water pumping machines, and 9 Gold detectors machines were also seized from the miners as exhibits.
Source: Mybrytfmonline.com/Obed Ansah
