Today, Ghana pauses to remember the eight gallant men who became casualties of the country’s fight against the illegal mining menace, widely known as galamsey.
It’s exactly a year today that a tragedy of grave proportion befell the nation. Ghana Air Force Z-9 helicopter lifted off from Accra with five passengers and three crew, bound for Obuasi. The mission was not ceremonial. It was about galamsey, the illegal small-scale mining that has poisoned the country’s rivers and swallowed its forests.
On board were Defence Minister Dr Edward Omane Boamah, Environment Minister Dr Ibrahim Murtala Muhammed, NDC vice chair Dr Samuel Sarpong, Acting Deputy National Security Coordinator Alhaji Muniru Mohammed Limuna, former parliamentary candidate Samuel Aboagye, and three airmen: Squadron Leader Peter Bafemi Anala, Flying Officer Manin Twum-Ampadu and Sergeant Ernest Addo Mensah.
None survived the downdraft that brought the aircraft down over the forested hills of Adansi Akrofuom. As part of the national remembrance, a National Inter-Faith Memorial Service and the unveiling of a memorial cenotaph will mark the anniversary today, followed by a nationwide blood donation drive on Saturday.
However, beneath the solemnity sits a harder question that ceremony alone cannot answer: did their deaths actually change anything on the ground?
What has Changed?
By most official measures, something did shift. The National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat (NAIMOS), which stood up in the aftermath, has become the face of a more visible enforcement push.
In its first-half 2026 account, the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry reported 207 arrests, 78 excavators seized and another 90 immobilised on-site, alongside roughly 2,800 chanfang washing machines destroyed and over 1,200 makeshift mining camps demolished. Periodic raid reports were read to update the nation.
There have been significant wins, too. In February, the government announced the reclamation of an 800-acre galamsey site at Nyankumase in the Ashanti Region. President Mahama has cited early signs of river recovery in areas where the Environmental Protection Agency, NAIMOS and river guards have sustained pressure. NAIMOS’s own leadership has claimed an 87.7% success rate for its operations and plans to deploy nine permanent field task forces to mining hotspots this year, alongside closer coordination with the Blue Water Guards.
President Mahama’s own account of the past year concedes an earlier misstep where security forces were withdrawn too quickly after early clearance operations, letting miners drift back to sites they’d been chased from. To fix this was the policy of permanent troop deployment to hotspots, backed by a substantially bigger budget in the 2026 allocation.
The Weaknesses
Despite all the efforts, numerous reports indicate that the same rivers the task forces are clearing keep needing to be cleared again. NAIMOS’s own field reports repeatedly describe operators returning to previously disrupted sites with the same equipment and the same labour pool.
This is a recurring feature of the fight rather than an exception. The Water Resources Commission still puts roughly 60% of Ghana’s water bodies as polluted, with turbidity readings in some rivers reaching 14,000 NTU, seven times the 2,000 NTU ceiling water treatment plants are built to handle.
Cocoa production, according to Ghana Cocoa Board figures cited by analysts, sits at less than 55 percent of seasonal output, with galamsey named as a leading cause.
Then there are the questions enforcement statistics can’t settle. The Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), created to formalise gold trading, is itself under scrutiny over whether its purchases might be indirectly absorbing gold from illicit sources.
There have also been allegations of infighting within the security apparatus in Ashanti Region, with officials accusing each other of shielding protected operators. In addition, there are allegations of missing excavators seized from illegal miners in past crackdowns. There are still the allegations of political involvement in the menace. Moreover, galamseyers are occupying new areas everyday.
One Year On: Where Does the Country Stand
It is safe to say that significant actions were taken after the tragedy. But the critical question is, what has been the real impact in ridding the country off illegal mining.
Did their sacrifice really become the turning point the nation promised itself in its grief last August? Or has Ghana simply gotten better at documenting a war it is still, by its own water-quality data, losing?
As the cenotaph is unveiled today and the country observes another moment of silence, this should be a moment of silence for the country to reassess the fight against the menace that comes along with an existential threat. The death of the 8 men should really count for something in the fight against galamsey.
