Erastus Donkor Exposes Ghana’s Galamsey Trade on Al Jazeera

Multimedia environmental journalist Erastus Asare Donkor has appeared on Al Jazeera to open up on Ghana’s galamsey trade.

Donkor spoke about an incident in which he and his team were attacked by illegal miners while at a site at Asumenya close to Manso Nkran in the Ashanti region.

“They were holding pump-action guns. Some of them were holding assault rifles. At that point, I felt they were going to kill us. We saw over 10 fully armed, heavily built men approaching us angrily. I got a series of slaps. One will come from here, slap you from here, then the other will slap you from behind,” he said.

Donkor, who has been celebrated for his reporting on galamsey, also opened up on how his reportage develops.

He said he often receives calls from community leaders and chiefs about their towns being destroyed by illegal miners and he goes in to investigate.

He said he was on one of those investigative trips when he was physically assaulted.

“We receive complaints from communities, from chiefs, from farmers, from almost everybody. They file complaints with us and ask us to put it under the spotlight. So we received one from a whistleblower in the Ashanti region. There is this company which was using methods that did not conform to conventional ways of mining. So we went to the site, we flew our drone, and we saw that there were environmental infractions on the ground.” he said.

Watch the video below.

Analysis of Erastus Donkor’s Al Jazeera appearance

The spotlight on illegal mining in Ghana is much warranted because the environmental impact of the menace is immeasurable.

The past few years have been a mess, and the governments of the day are doing little to combat it.

Hopefully the international attention this brings would place some pressure on the NDC government to accelerate efforts to tamp down the menace.