Ghana’s former president and presidential candidate on the ticket of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama, promised that granting amnesty to imprisoned galamseyers is a priority on his to-do list if he is voted back into power.
In a video of Mahama speaking at the Durbar of Chiefs and People at Odum-Banso, Mahama said, “When we come to power, all those who were arrested for galamsey and jailed, we will grant them amnesty so that they can return to society”.
Paul Adom Okyere, during an episode of the Good Evening Ghana show, pulled out this video which apparently is from 2020 and shared his comments. “Some people look at it as a clear statement undermining the government’s efforts to curb galamsey because if you are former president of 2013-2017 and a new president comes in at 2017 and launches a major anti-galamsey policy, and in 2020 elections two years down the line, the former president tells the people campaigning in the galamsey areas that ‘if I am elected, everybody campaigning in the galamsey areas, I’ll release them’, viewers, you decide”.
“Listen to it again and make your own view out of it. I think that it’s a clear way to undermine the government’s policy of galamsey where you would’ve thought that civil society and government and opposition and parliament would come together to sort of erase this menace and cause it to be a thing of the past”.
In his opinion, galamsey is a menace and a stigma on the Ghanaian society, and it involves a lot of money because solving it is problematic, hence, “If the government in place is trying to solve it and it’s election time and for the sake of votes or elections, the former president makes these comments, then I don’t know what to make of it”.
