Vice President of IMANI-Africa, Bright Simons is suspecting that the country might be overemphasizing on illegal mining as the sole contributor to the rising turbidity levels in the country’s water resources.
Ghana is currently grappling with water treatment issues as the state’s water producer, Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has complained several times that high turbidity levels in its source rivers make treatment difficult. Currently, some parts of the country are experiencing water crises due to the inability of GWCL to treat this “highly contaminated” water to a wholesome level.
The latest impact of the menace is the notice served by the GWCL of its inability to serve Cape Coast and Elmina communities adequately due to a shortage of the needed raw water that can be treated. This challenge comes at a time when Cape Coast is celebrating its famous Fetu Afahye where people from all walks of life will converge for the celebration hence making water very crucial.
GWCL is blaming the situation on the prevalence of illegal mining, widely known as galamsey in and around the Pra River where water is mainly collected for treatment at its Sekyere-Hemang Water Treatment Plant.
“About sixty percent of (60%) of the catchment capacity is silted as a result of illegal mining (galamsey) compromising the quality of raw water. We are currently recording an average turbidity of 14,000 NTU instead of 2000 NTU designed for adequate treatment,” Ghana Water said in a statement last week.
But Bright Simons believes there could be a possibility that the country is overemphasizing on illegal mining as the sole contributor to the polluted rivers. He is convinced that there might be other factors apart from galamsey which need to be investigated.
The IMANI Fellow is calling for extensive research to concretely identify all the factors playing a role in the rise in turbidity levels so that proper response measures can be implemented. The concern of Bright Simons emanates from vast research across the world where high turbidity levels in rivers were attributed to factors such as climate change, soil erosion, and poor farming practices among others.
“Excessive turbidity in water bodies isn’t only caused by alluvial panning by illegal miners searching for gold. It can also be caused by soil erosion in the water body, runoff due to landsliding banks & algal growth & microflora,” he explained.
He adds that, “it would thus be helpful if Ghana’s water scientists can be more exact and emphatic in quantifying the exact contribution of illegal mining to the browning and clouding of the waters the country is witnessing. Evidence from serious research should help.”
While avoiding the temptation to downplay the role of illegal mining in this menace, in his view, any response measure that only focuses on illegal mining while there are other factors will achieve very little to no success.
“Obviously, there can be no tolerance for mining so close to water bodies for all manner of reasons. However, there are multiple causative factors, and focusing on just one without fully understanding the whole picture can lead to poor policy choices. More importantly, it will make it impossible to when progress is being made in one or more dimensions of the problem because of lack of categorization,” the Vice President of IMANI-Africa contended.
