The government has commenced processes to track the importation and use of excavators in the country.
The initiative, which forms part of measures being deployed to fight illegal mining, will involve trained enforcement officers at the port to tag and track all excavators being brought into the country.
The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, explained to the Daily Graphic that they are rolling out the system in collaboration with relevant state agencies.
These include the Ministry of Transport, Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority (GPHA), Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Minerals Commission and the Forestry Commission.
“The personnel are currently going through the recruitment process, including screening and shortlisting. The recruitment process is expected to be completed by the end of April 2025,” he said.
Mr Buah further explained that apart from tagging excavators being imported, all such equipment already in the country would be tagged by a dedicated team spearheaded by the Minerals Commission.
“So, we will have two teams working on this initiative. One will be deployed at the ports to tag the machinery coming in, while the other team will commence tagging already existing excavators in the country, starting from Accra,” he said.
Mr Buah said the team that would be tagging already existing excavators would be accompanied by the police and military hired by the Minerals Commission.
He added that apart from tagging the excavators, trackers would be installed on the machines to ensure that those allocated for mining stayed within the designated concession areas.
Technology key
The minister added that as part of the government’s resolve to deploy modern technology to facilitate the fight against galamsey, all legal small-scale mining concessions had been geo-fenced, while the coordinates of the site plans of each concession had been integrated into the Ghana Mine Repository and Tracking software at the Minerals Commission.
Mr Buah explained that the software paired each excavator to a licensed small-scale concession at a time, with 15 metres buffer around each concession.
“Within the buffer zone, the excavator operator is prompted by a beeping sound indicating that even though he is within his working area, he is about to leave his concession area, and he should return to his concession. If he continues and moves out of the defined buffer of the concession, the excavator is immediately immobilised remotely,” he said.
He added that once a tracker was installed on an excavator, a sticker bearing the telephone number to the control room was affixed on the excavator.
“This sticker also identifies the excavator as being tracked and have fulfilled its required obligation,” he said.
Forest reserves
The minister further said all forest reserves and water bodies were expected to be electronically geo-fenced and monitored in real time from the control room at the Minerals Commission.
“Any tracked excavator that enters a forest reserve or defined waterway will be similarly immobilised,” he stressed.
He further stressed that any tracked excavator that entered an exclusion zone, such as a forest reserve or waterway, would be immobilised and the operations centre of the military would be informed with the exact coordinates of the illegal entry, and a task force dispatched to the location to effect the arrest of the transgressors.
Context
This is not the first time the government is seeking to track excavators in the country to fight galamsey.
On July 20, 2022, the former Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor, announced that all excavators in mining concessions would be tracked electronically as part of major measures to clamp down on illegal mining.
The former minister had indicated that the tracking of the equipment would be anchored on a control room that had been set up at the Minerals Commission for the effective rollout of the initiative.
Mr Jinapor had also said the decision to deploy the tracking devices was to enforce the Minerals and Mining (Mineral Operations — Tracking of Earthmoving and Mining Equipment) Regulations, 2020 (L.I. 2404) that empowered the commission to track all earthmoving machines and equipment used in mining operations.
On October 24, 2022, the former minister further directed owners and users of excavators to register their equipment with the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) within their respective jurisdictions latest by November 2, 2022.
He had also asked the MMDAs to ensure that owners of excavators disclosed the purpose for acquisition of the machines before they were registered.
Challenge persists
Despite these measures, there are a large number of excavators in the country that have not been registered or not being tracked.
Mr Buah said the current challenge was that “large number of excavators in the country have not been registered by DVLA, while those that are registered have not been fitted with trackers”.
He added that currently, the monitoring system at the Minerals Commission was tracking 70 excavators which had tags and geo-fencing technology.
Meanwhile, Daryl Bosu, who is the Deputy National Director of A Rocha Ghana, a non-profit environmental organisation, described the move by the government to track all excavators as one of the best approaches to dealing with the galamsey scourge.
“This move is a very important aspect of compliance and the government should go ahead and do it; it should not be another talk shop,” he said.
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