#Look@GalamsayAgain. (Part 2)
We Need Help.
It is gradually getting bad and I cannot take it any longer. We all used to drink from the Rivers Yaya, Anikoko, Krupa, Ahyire and the sweet and refreshing Forson springs, until I met my colleague unemployed graduate who mentioned to me that he has gotten an investment partner. In a few days I saw and heard some machines making noise all over and then the stream was beginning to change colour, just like a bleaching African lady. Soon the water was undrinkable. I am still jobless and my colleague is now a big time bank roller. He drilled a bolehole near his house to sell and now my whole community will have to buy water from his tap, including my poor grandmother who has to carry water now from home to farm because it is the same stream that runs through our family land.
It was just pathetic that I saw the family of our village chief also buying water from his subjects. You see?
Now our farms produce are in retail shops and cold stores keep our bush meat for us. Now the poor arebuying water and food, which hitherto were free and or cheap for all of us, from few galamsey-rich individuals.
Joblessness? Smartness? Selfishness? Greed? Exploitation? Capitalistic? Inhumane? Mediocrity? Over Extraction? Insensitivity? Or what again? Lawlessness? These are the few words to describe the other side of the illegal, unregulated and discriminate small scale mining activity in my homeland. There will be no other better for a case study than my own Wassa Japa and Akropong areas.
No job for the book graduate and how much more for the unskilled, the untrained and for the vulnerable school drop-out. That is the reality. Hope is lost and so now the hungry man is not just an angry man but more so a "crazy-for-anything-lucrative" man. Everyone is hustling to be a recognized personality in our communities so there is huge scramble for territory as in the case of the Scramble of Africa, and the competition is great to the detriment of the voiceless and helpless poor. A modern form of survival of the fittest. No wonder the consequent influx of many spiritualists, herbalists, mallams, fake pastors into my area.
No job for the book graduate and how much more for the unskilled, the untrained and for the vulnerable school drop-out. That is the reality. Hope is lost and so now the hungry man is not just an angry man but more so a "crazy-for-anything-lucrative" man. Everyone is hustling to be a recognized personality in our communities so there is huge scramble for territory as in the case of the Scramble of Africa, and the competition is great to the detriment of the voiceless and helpless poor. A modern form of survival of the fittest. No wonder the consequent influx of many spiritualists, herbalists, mallams, fake pastors into my area.
The water is polluted but no one to speak for them, and the noise is deafening hut whom are you to complain to. Chinue Achibe mention "there once here a big mighty tree......and in its place is ..........". Our trees are gone and nothing better stands in their place than the heaps of washed stones and undirected trenches. Are they death traps? Danger looms and we need your help!
Everything seems to fall apart but, in my view, the center can hold and stand if only we will be proactive. My Youth are in the center. Let us rise to mobilise them, train the unskilled, guide the skilled, regulate the operators to reclame the land, properly motivate and equip the jobless for the new job of land reclamation.
I hear of whispers of Multi-Lateral Integrated Mining Project and some Planting for Jobs. If they are real, then I believe Wassa Amenfi should be active partners in these projects. Yes, I believe in acts of the apostles and not books of lamentations. I pledge to use my skills as a Community Development worker to assist to arrest the situation now, what have you to offer now for ailing Mother Ghana? This is why I still blow my own trumpet #Look@galamseyAgain.
By; Simon Peter Adabor (0243946642 / 0209885337,
spadabor17@gmail.com
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