It is almost certainly the case that the recently reported illegal mining operation in the Kuyuwini River in Region Nine had been occurring long before the public disclosure that “at least three river dredges” were operating illegally in the area. Transgressions of this nature are now par for the course at interior mining locations. In their remoteness from coastal attention these persist unnoticed for protracted periods and in all probability far more frequently than those of us situated at a ‘safe’ distance from them realize; and even when they eventually come to public knowledge the ‘whole truth’ about them is sometimes elusive and the extent of the official attention that they attract is usually limited and largely ineffective.
Here, the point should be made as well, that the private sector, with its own direct interest in gold mining, rarely if ever has anything to say about these environmental transgressions. Frankly, it is high time that our private sector bodies begin to sound their voices on issues that have to do with the preservation of the environment even when these may cut across their members business interests.
This most recent disclosure of yet another assault on the country’s environmental legacy has been attended by the customary official flurry of high-sounding verbiage, the customary rhetoric, to put it bluntly. That is probably as far as it will go. Our environmental bona fides would now appear decidedly subsumed beneath substantive mining interests. Material aggrandizement is what, it would seem, takes precedence over the preservation of our longer-term environmental patrimony. How to change that reality, to place a far higher value on our environmental treasures, to appreciate that these must outlast our own short-term occupation of this geographic space, is not an issue which, as a nation, we are, as yet, even remotely close to coming to terms with.
This is not to say that a thicket of high-sounding environmental laws and constrictions on paper that set boundaries for mining operations can thrive in splendid isolation from serious enforcement capability. That being said, the repetitive undertakings by the GGMC to “investigate” and take action in instances where infractions like those in the Kuyuwini River occur, have a hollow ring to them, devoid as they usually are of a sense of any real intent. What the GGMC appears to be blissfully unaware of, or, perhaps, may simply be ignoring, is the reality of what has become widespread public awareness a ‘bottom line’ that has to do with much more than a deterrence capability deficit.
The never-ending public discourses on transgression of environmental laws in gold-bearing areas, whether these be in rivers or on land, are not only taking place in a giant lacuna, they have become, patently, a complete waste of time. The script, as it is, does little more than seek to direct public attention away from some of the irrefutable truths that have to do with instances of indifference to transgressions fuelled by corrupt arrangements of which a generous measure of evidence has long been forthcoming.
We can pin the blame all we like on the limited official deterrent capabilities, there is, as well, generous evidence of a scarcity of will. Who among the official enforcers of policy can honestly deny that the issue of mining and the environment has become what one might call a ‘bigger stakes’ consideration, that there is a great deal more to environmental transgressions in the gold mining sector than simply a matter of official deterrence capability.
Not only has the tirade of official responses to occurrences like those in the Kuyuwini River become patently lacking in believability, they have completely lost any sort of traction with those who know better. In that sense they often come across as both defensive and cynical. There is a Kafkaesque quality to the character of the gold mining sector in Guyana (though the propensity is not unique to Guyana) which the committed environmentalist is bound to find unbearable.
We have reached a point where official pronouncements resemble a process of simply going through the motions, a practice that bears resemblance to frenetic terrier-like yelps bereft of any sort of menacing intent.
One is not, mind you, indifferent to the scarcity of those corrective capabilities. You get the feeling, however, that those deficiencies, all too often, are pressed into service as smokescreens intended to conceal hidden agendas.
Gold mining irregularities, like law and order loopholes, on the whole, in some of our interior regions, derive, in large measure, from resource-related deficiencies in our policing infrastructure. But there is another common characteristic here. In the instances of both substantive policing and mining oversight, all too often, genuine weaknesses in execution-related infrastructure are deployed as a means of concealing inefficiencies, incompetence and sometimes worse. In the instance of the gold mining sector the real challenge reposes in reconciling rhetoric about protecting our environmental legacy with the reality of the unbridled lawlessness that sometimes obtains in the sector while, of course, accepting that there are, after all, monitoring and oversight deficiencies to be addressed.
With due respect to the Commissioner of the GGMC his reported comments given to the Sunday Stabroek in response to the reports about the occurrences in the Kuyuwini River amount to little more than whistling in the wind. ‘People know different,’ as we say in Guyana.
Setting aside what we are so often told are the deterrent limitations of the GGMC there is, as well, a need to face other realities like those that have to do with a strong collective sense of the importance of an environmental legacy that must be afforded the opportunity to outlive the shorter-term aggrandizement that lies at the root of many of the anomalies in the gold-mining sector. It requires new mindsets rather than new laws to bring about that change. It does not appear that either some of the miners or even some of the law-enforcers themselves have as yet arrived at that point of environmental maturity.
