Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, a former Director-General of the Bureau of National Intelligence, is not wrong about one thing: galamsey has become a serious national problem whose effects are becoming graver by the day. His assertion that criminal networks behind illegal mining (where they exist) should not be dealt with by only arresting low-level operators while financiers, facilitators and enablers are left is also right.
Nevertheless, his recent intervention again appears as an attempt to convert a problem of governance and enforcement into a problem of intelligence architecture. The plain, elementary question in this circumstance is: what exactly is the intelligence community expected to foretell about galamsey that is new or that the State does not already know?
Galamsey does not constitute an emerging threat that is yet to be found by intelligence analysts. It is already an illegal activity. The Minerals and Mining Act of Ghana establishes the legal framework that regulates mining, and subsequent amendments have continued to strengthen sanctions for illegal mining and related offences.
Therefore, what the State needs is not intelligence to tell it that a person who operates mining equipment without legal authorization, encroaching a prohibited area and is destroying a river body, is involved in an illegal activity. In many cases, these activities are done in the open, in broad daylight, in known communities, using excavators, washing plants, pits and other visible infrastructure. This is where the thesis about “forward-looking intelligence” becomes unnecessarily theoretical.
Assuredly, intelligence is useful in identifying the financiers of illegal mining, the equipment supply networks, depraved officials who protect the criminals, the flow of illicit funds and other organized criminal scopes. That intelligence is certainly useful, but its function is to aid enforcement, not to supersede or replace enforcement.
Indeed, the author’s own proposal implicitly concedes this point. He calls for intelligence to identify the actors, financing structures, political and chieftaincy relationships, and other networks behind galamsey before enforcement is undertaken. But how much more intelligence is required before the State acts against an illegal mining operation that is already known, visible and operating in defiance of the law? The very “incident diary” that the author denigrates is replete with useful information on the actors involved in the menace, from the Professor Frempong Boateng Report prior to the 2020 General Elections in which the infamous “party hea sika” – “party needs money” was recorded to the lead-up to the 2024 elections in which constituency executives of political parties were explicitly mentioned as enablers of galamsey activities in order to finance their party. Even the recent trial and incarceration of the former Ashanti Regional Chairman of the author’s own NPP for his involvement in galamsey is a clear case in point.
It is gravely dangerous to make intelligence the explanation for every dereliction of the State. Somewhere along the line, the problem is no longer that the State is oblivious. The problem is that the State is well-informed but lacks the courage for decisive, consistent, dispassionate action.
If a galamseyer is engaged in illegal mining in the open, the critically useful questions are not necessarily “What will this look like in twenty-four months?” or “What is the trajectory of this threat?” The timely questions are: Who has the authority to halt it? Why has it not been stopped? Who is protecting it? Why has the protection not been investigated? Why are offenders not being prosecuted? And why do operations resume after enforcement teams leave? Those are questions of political will, institutional discipline, enforcement capacity and accountability.
Furthermore, it is essential to draw the distinction between legitimate intelligence requirements and intelligence becoming an apology for delayed action. If intelligence reveals that a certain individual is a financier of dozens of illegal mining operations, that information can make enforcement more effective. But it ought not to become necessary to generate a suave national intelligence assessment before the State takes decisive action against the illegal mining operation itself. Nor should the enforcement of Ghana’s mining laws be depicted as something that would necessarily discourage foreign investment. Serious foreign investors are not discouraged because a state enforces its laws. They are more likely to be concerned about a state in which the application of laws is circumfused in selectivity, illegal operators are insolent, environmental standards are treated with reckless abandon and legitimate businesses are left to contend with enterprises operating illegally. A predictable rule-of-law environment is an investment advantage; selective enforcement is not.
The latest article further shows an intricate division of intelligence responsibilities among the Bureau of National Intelligence, Research Department, National Signals Bureau and Defence Intelligence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with inter-agency coordination. Nonetheless, the question is whether such sophisticated framework is actually the missing ingredient in the fight against galamsey.
The State cannot delay action while a four-agency intelligence fusion mechanism is invoked to establish what may happen in three or five years to a river that is being destroyed today. The river needs protection today. In the same way, if an excavator is operating illegally today, it needs to be halted today, or if a financier is identified today, the correct investigative and prosecutorial processes should kickstart today, or if a public official, traditional authority, security officer or other person is confirmed to be aiding galamsey, the law should promptly apply to that person.
Clearly, that is not an argument against intelligence. It is an argument against over-intellectualizing a problem whose most basic inadequacy is the failure to translate knowledge and law into decisive action.
There is another uncomfortable question that the former Director-General’s interventions have not sufficiently addressed. If the country’s intelligence architecture has been so fundamentally incapable of providing forward-looking assessments, as he repeatedly suggests, then what institutional reforms were initiated during his own tenure to correct this alleged deficiency? What collection priorities were established? What analytical systems were introduced? What threat assessments were produced? What warnings were issued? And what recommendations were made to decision-makers concerning galamsey?
Criticism of an institution after leaving office is legitimate. But former institutional leaders should also be prepared to account for what they did with the institutional authority, information and resources available to them while they occupied the very positions from which they now diagnose systemic failure.
Most certainly, the fight against galamsey requires intelligence. It requires investigation. It requires financial tracing. It requires intelligence-led targeting of financiers and facilitators. It requires inter-agency cooperation. But above all, it requires the State to enforce its own laws, and do so intentionally, decisively, consistently and fearlessly.
Galamsey has continued not because Ghana lacks the intellectual capacity to conceive what it might become. It has continued because, over many years, illegal mining has been allowed to continue despite the State knowing what is happening.
The country therefore needs less theorizing about what galamsey might become and more determination to deal with what it already is.
An illegal activity does not become less illegal because its perpetrators are organized. And the State does not need a new intelligence architecture to know that a crime being committed openly must be stopped.
Source: Oko Tetteh – Researcher and Intelligence Analyst
