The Fight Against Galamsey: Is Ghana A Failed State?

By Charles Prempeh, PhD*

The question about whether any state in Africa has failed and/or is failing is certainly both ideologically and politically charged. However, I will make an attempt to answer the question, bearing in mind the constitutionality of the modern state from the perspective of Ghana’s notorious Galamsey.

I take Ghana and its entanglement with the Galamsey quagmire for two main reasons: First, Ghana has a relatively stabilized democracy and second, since the late country’s 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century Ghana’s public and academic intellectuals have provided a major source of inspiration for governance and leadership on the continent of Africa and its diaspora.

That Ghana’s historic and contemporary credibility sits concurrently (if not comfortably) with Galamsey, a major self-imposed calamity, implies the country’s own shameful nemesis. With Galamsey currently standing as an existential threat to Ghanaians and the world, the menace has received extensive research attention with an equal proliferation of both popular and scholarly publications on the subject.

Possibly, however, because academics, in particular, are not necessarily policy implementers, once they publish the outcome of their research, they teach it, and try, where possible, to influence policy directives. Even so, given the aggressive and belligerent turn of Ghana’s politics in social-media world of eco-chambers and (in)visibility—merging with unmeasured politics of denigration, several academics prefer to hem themselves in the gown—a situation that has elicited apathy and a decline in public intellectualism that animated Ghana’s public sphere from the 1970s to 1990s.

So, how do we assess the Galamsey challenge? Does Galamsey signal Ghana as a failed state? Before I respond to this questions, I need to first begin with what I mean by a failed state. But to understand that concept is also predicated on our understanding of the constitution of the modern state, basically a by-product of the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century. Emerging out of the secularization of Western politics, the modern state, far more than the pre-modern state, is an imagined community. It is, therefore, held together by a social contract.

The importance of the social contract lies at the heart of the nature of the public sphere, which is both plural and constitutionally contentious, for two main reasons: First, the public sphere is about money and power. Second, because the ownership of money and power declines when these resources are decentralized, the public sphere is a hub of contention and potential incivility (or the so-called state of nature).

Consequently, the social contract is to define the boundaries of public governance, where circumscribed power is offered a sovereign to decide on the exception. The sovereign decides on the exception in a manner that could give rise to destruction for constructive purpose.

The performance of this function of the sovereign finds expression in the Weberian conceptualization of the modern state as the elites/sovereign’s capacity to use legitimate coercion to foster law and order. That the sovereign enjoys “extra” power, other than the ordinary citizen, is borne out of an existential reality of the human ontology—the human predilection to deviance, more so, oppositional deviance in the case of Galamsey.

From the above, the constitutive logic of both the social contract and sovereign of the lead political elite, merging with the plurality and contentious nature of the public, implies that no area of the public sphere should be left ungoverned. So, in the case of Galamsey, certainly a mortal threat to human flourishing and penultimate existence (giving a necessary space to providence), a failed state could be measured in terms of how the political sovereign marshals legitimate coercive instrument to routinize law and order in public governance.

If we are to use the above as a canon to measure Ghana as a failed state or not, then the Galamsey issue gives the nation up for a critical evaluation. This also means that it appears the elites have failed to use the forces of statecraft, including soft power, such as education, and hard power, such as the security apparatus to end Galamsey. In effect, the fight against Galamsey is simultaneously both a philosophical and a technical challenge.

From the philosophical perspective, it is about choreographing the loyalty of Ghanaian citizens towards the collective good. Nevertheless, given that the loyalty of citizens sprawls across family, faith, and friends, before the state (though conditionally ordered or not neatly ordered), the duty of the political is about answering the fundamental question of citizens for building an imagined community: Why must I (citizen) submit to the good an imagined common good?

The above leads to the next issue: What explains the brazenness with which Galamseyers continue to destroy the country’s ecological integrity? The answer may not be simple. Nevertheless, it could be gleaned from the possibility of Ghana having ungoverned spaces. The point is that the political economy of Galamsey, including the production, importation and transportation of enabling materials for the menace are visible and physical and go through mediations and corridors that are traceable and governable.

Also, the proceeds of Galamsey are physical and measurable, in economic terms. So, if with all these multidimensional visibility in the political economy of Galamsey the state appears powerless in dealing with the menace, then could Ghana, in terms of environmental governance and the extent of the damage Galamsey is causing constitute a locus classicus of a failed state?

Again, to return to our earlier question on citizens and Galamsey, because the loyalty of citizens is not ontologically at the behest of the state, the political elites have power to compel citizens to act right. The elites could use both legitimate and illegitimate means to compel citizens to act right. The legitimate means are known. But the illegitimate means, often hardly discussed, is real, even if rarely put to use in public governance. In fact, as I have said, the political sovereign’s function in ensuring law and order is coterminous with the capacity to decide on the exception.

This may come across as controversial. But it is also that which allows public governance to be possible. If our leaders were carefully and constitutionally chosen—indexing the manifest expression of the will of majority of citizens, then capacity of the president to decide on the exception in the fight against Galamsey would, in the worst-case scenario result in, “Destruction for constructive purpose.” If this is anything difficult to put into practice, we should just bear in mind that the president’s authority to do right is not on the same scale as that of the head of my family.

In the end, the president of Ghana has been given sufficient and necessary power, if not even more, to arrest the Galamseyers and Galamsey activities and bring an end to the wanton destruction of the country’s water bodies.

So, to have Galamsey constituting a mortal albatross on the necks of Ghanaians and to the have the environment put to such grotesque visible destruction, potentially, bespeaks the extent of sovereign leadership in Ghana and the possibility of a nation that is on the false precipice of collapse, from the Anthropocene perspective.

*Dr Charles Prempeh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, KNUST