President Mahama clears air on recent media excavator allegations, controversies, outlines new regulations:

President John Dramani Mahama has addressed recent media reports alleging that the government had imported and concealed a number of excavators within the country. During a press engagement, the President refuted these claims, branding them as “baseless” and unfounded.

“I want to address the recent allegations that we have brought in and hidden several excavators,” President Mahama stated. “I want to categorically state that these claims are simply not true.

He emphasized the government’s commitment to transparency and the rule of law. “We are not hiding anything,” the President asserted. He then clarified the situation regarding excavators at the port.

“What happened was there were so many that they had occupied a huge area of the port and congested the port. And so we found the land near Shy Hills, near the military installation. And the field engineers, regiment, and others have been given charge to move the excavators from the port to that area so that they can free up space in the ports. And they do that at night because of traffic in the daytime.”

He further emphasized, “Before any of those excavators are released, they must be tracked, they must have a tracker on them, they must be registered by the owner of the excavator, and we must know the purpose for which the excavator has been imported. Because the construction industry also imports excavators, and so you cannot put a blanket ban on importation of excavators just because you think that every excavator is going to go into the illegal mining industry.

“Even the big mining companies that have licenses import excavators. And so we want to know who is importing the excavators, who it is going to. We want to be able to put a tracker on it and be able to trace that excavator wherever it is in the country.”

The President also addressed recent changes to the Anti-Galamsey Task Force. “We called off the IGP’s Anti-Galamsee Task Force because they are supposed to coordinate with NIMOS, that is the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat. Unfortunately, they were not doing that. ”