The Ministry of Natural Resources has announced that it will be assigning wardens to mining areas in order to try to rein in the deeply worrying levels of the various types of lawlessness that obtain in the gold-mining regions of Guyana.
It is a decidedly belated move that comes only after it had long been concluded that what obtained in the mining sector was a ‘Wild West’ situation with all of the attendant excesses, and that it had become a runaway stallion which the government was powerless to control.
It need hardly be said, of course, that, in large measure, gold mining had long been left largely to its own devices, the irrefutable evidence reposing in the fact that over time the government has not even troubled itself to create an adequate law enforcement infrastructure in an environment that would surely have needed that kind of cover. Nowhere, perhaps, has evidence of this looseness been more apparent than in the widespread illegal occupation of state lands by rogue miners and confrontations among miners warring over access to lands.
Perusal of the records will doubtless bare evidence of numerous exchanges between the Guyana Police Force and the various stakeholders in the mining sector, including the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) and the miners themselves, aimed at collaborative initiatives to curb the lawlessness in the sector. This recently announced initiative by Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman points, to a large extent, to the failure of those earlier initiatives.
Or perhaps it might be more accurate to argue that the various earlier discourses on the issue of providing more effective security for the mining sector simply reflect officialdom’s enduring propensity for debating issues ‘to death,’ so to speak, and afterwards simply finding another matter to contemplate.
This raises the question as to whether this latest initiative involving wardens for the sector is likely to be quickly and effectively implemented. Frankly, while there is a sore need for success in bringing a measure of order to the sector, precedent dictates that we exercise a healthy measure of scepticism about the likely viability of the Warden initiative, at least until we hear a great deal more about it.
It would appear from the content of the release issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources that this new policing tier will be required to embrace both ensuring that substantive mining rules and regulations pertaining to, among other things, the environment and safety are adhered to, as well as dealing with issues of law and order including gun-running and drug smuggling. Presumably, too, the wardens will have some role to play in government’s attempts to put a brake on the smuggling of gold out of the country.
The first thing that this formidable list of duties suggests is that the corps of Wardens will have to be a highly trained and disciplined force comprising recruits who have a considerable measure of security knowledge and training and who understand the mining environment. Putting a team like that together will be a challenge and it will also take some time and resources. We are going to have to be told as well how these wardens will function vis-à-vis the Guyana Police Force, since it is explicitly stated in the Ministry of Natural Resources’ media release that the Wardens will also have some amount of police powers.
No less important is the matter of how these wardens will function vis-à-vis Mines Officers and other GGMC officials, under whose authority the wardens will fall, and just where the lines of authority will be drawn. After all, not even the Ministry of Natural Resources will refute the fact that serious questions have been raised about the level of integrity of functionaries within the GGMC; nor would the ministry be shocked if questions were to be raised about the likelihood of its wardens becoming just another tier of a corrupt bureaucracy.
If the announcement by Minister Trotman is, in itself, an interesting one, there is need for the Ministry of Natural Resources to put flesh on the bones of the warden proposal, particularly as this relates to the scale of their authority, including the structure of the organization under which they will fall; and whom or what, specifically, they will be answerable to. The mining sector, we need to be reminded is not only battling the demons of lawlessness and illegality but also the widely held view that corruption has become an occupational hazard.
It is a good thing that some thought is seemingly being given to infusing a measure of good order and legality into the gold mining sector, though the government would hopefully be aware that watchers are bound to wonder aloud as to whether the warden initiative can bring the lawlessness in the sector to heel. That, and not the mere announcement of the initiative, is the minister’s real challenge.
