The People Should Declare a State of Emergency

The President spoke at the UN last week about the developed world’s response to climate change — earnest words delivered under bright lights and diplomatic protocol. Back home, those words ring hollow. Our rivers are dying, farms are being buried in silt, and communities are choking on dust while decisions made in suit-filled offices legitimise the very destruction the President promised to oppose on the world stage.

It is now painfully clear that private interests and political-economic ends matter more to those in power than the life, health and future of ordinary Ghanaians. The trade-offs are explicit: keep the short-term inflows of gold and the patronage networks that accompany them, or protect the water, the soil, and the lungs of our children. When the Ghana Gold Board’s CEO — Sammy Gyamfi — argues that the NDC never promised a state of emergency even as his institution formalises avenues for artisanal and small-scale mining, the effect is infuriating and obscene. It is a statement that normalises the very sector destroying our country.

Calls for urgent action have not come only from grassroots activists. Faith leaders, civil-society groups and coalitions have demanded emergency measures; the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference, among others, has warned that galamsey “ravages our rivers and forests, poisons our soil, endangers public health, corrupts governance and extinguishes livelihoods.” Yet the Presidency insists on restraint, saying existing powers must first be exhausted — even as the rivers run orange and communities accumulate the long bill of environmental and health debt.

We the people have no choice but to declare a state of emergency for our lives and for the future of our children. Not a fevered call to lawlessness, but a deliberate civic emergency: coordinated, legal, and relentless. If the state will not do what its primary duty requires — to protect life, land and water — then civil society must force the accounting, reveal the damage, and demand immediate, verifiable measures.

We will not allow national statistics to be padded by temporary gains from small-scale gold extraction that renders whole swathes of the country uninhabitable. From now on, in every public analysis of economic performance we publish, the impact of illicit small-scale gold mining will be isolated and discounted. Those mining receipts will be shown as what they are: advances on a future bill — debts to be paid in lives, ruined farmland, collapsing fisheries, and soaring health costs. We will make that accounting public and inescapable.

But accounting alone is insufficient. The people’s state of emergency requires immediate, practical, non-violent measures:

• Open evidence and transparency. Satellite imagery, concession maps, environmental assays and procurement records must be free for citizens and journalists to interrogate. Independent coalitions should publish real-time evidence of damage.

• Rapid legal interventions. Community legal clinics and civil society must prepare injunctions, strategic litigation and emergency petitions to block clearly illicit operations and to force enforcement where official action is absent.

• Conditional finance and sanctions. Development partners and public agencies must attach verifiable anti-galamsey conditions to funding; companies and contractors proven to benefit from illicit production must be publicly sanctioned and banned from public procurement.

• Permanent public accounting. All national economic briefs must publish “galamsey-adjusted” figures that deduct short-term extraction gains and estimate future environmental and health liabilities.

This is not a partisan demand. It is a moral imperative and a public health necessity. If leadership will not bore the deep structural holes in the political economy that enable galamsey — the patronage, the weak oversight, the regulatory capture — then the people must fill that governance deficit with truth, law and collective pressure.

We demand an emergency that protects life, not the profit of the few. We demand that the state act in the public interest. We demand that every financial figure be accompanied by the environmental ledger that those numbers hide. We are not calling for the destruction of our country; we are calling for its salvation. If the Presidency will not declare an emergency to halt the slow calamity of galamsey, then civil society must declare one of its own — not with violence, but with public accounting, rapid legal action, and relentless civic enforcement until our rivers run clean and our children can drink without fear.