Land acquisition expert, Kwame Gyan, says to tackle illegal mining in the country, those in possession of gold in its natural state should be jailed.
According to the lawyer, burning the excavators is not punitive enough to deter the illegal miners from going back into the forest.
He explained that as the constitution dictates that all minerals in their natural state are vested in the President, it automatically makes it illegal for anyone else to possess them.
“If I was involved in dealing with galamsey, this is one of the methods I will use, I will not burn excavators, I will charge people who are found holding gold in their natural state at the mining sites and jail them. That’s all I will do. I won’t burn excavators. I will just use our criminal law to jail them,” he said on Thursday.
He believes this approach will be more deterrent as illegal miners will be unable to sell their mined gold for fear of being caught.
He was speaking at the launch of the JoyNews/Ecobank Habitat Fair at the Accra International Conference Centre.
Earlier he had advocated for wannabe homeowners to opt for buying houses rather than building from scratch.
According to him, buying an already built home was a much safer option than going through the hassle of land acquisition.
He noted that those that often go through the land acquisition route end up spending their remaining years in land litigation courts defending their land titles.
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