Even as the government contemplates its next moves to shore up a mining sector reeling under pressure from continually falling gold prices, a succession of mining accidents some of which have resulted in multiple deaths and what, at this stage, is just the beginning of potentially scandalous allegations of large scale smuggling of gold out of Guyana, the recently concluded four-member Commission of Inquiry into “mine accident deaths by pit collapse” has launched a scathing attack on the sector’s key regulatory agency, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) charging, among other things, that the agency lacks “the focus, capacity and/or strategy to ensure that (gold mining) operations are meeting their legal responsibilities under accepted health and safety laws and guidelines and the requirements of the Mining Act.”
In a report that refuses to spare the feelings of the GGMC and its senior functionaries the Commissioners state that while the GGMC “should always aggressively prohibit any operator from running an unsafe operation until corrective measures….are implemented and passed”, the GGMC has taken the position of “looking the other way.” Asked to provide an interpretation of this comment, a Commission official told this newspaper that it appears to suggest that the regulatory agency “is complicit in some of these safety transgressions.”
The blunt revelations contained in the report present a considerable headache for government since they are serious enough to raise questions as to whether, in its present form, the GGMC is equipped to manage the gold industry.
It is not a consideration which the administration can afford to ignore. A technically proficient GGMC is clearly critical to the realization of the remedial goals that have been set out for the sector, not least those goals that have to do with significantly improving its on-the-ground monitoring capability in areas of compliance with the Mining Act including, critically, those that have to do with health and safety.
Of particular concern are those issues that have to do not only with the GGMC’s responsibility to raise the levels of its own operational and administrative capability but also to raise the capabilities and sensitivity of the miners since, apart from what we already know about some mining operations’ indifference to safety and health there is also the pronouncement in the report regarding the GGMC “looking the other way” in the face of these transgressions.
Certainly, we have now arrived at a juncture where it is not simply a question of government simply making another stern-sounding but in the circumstances meaningless pronouncement about safety in the mining sector since if we are to take the recent report seriously there is, it seems, a particular need for serious stock-taking as far as the quality of the GGMC’s execution of its functions is concerned. The last thing we need at this juncture is a political/bureaucratic apex sitting atop the GGMC. We need a competent and committed Commission.
