The commitment given by Natural Resources and Environment Minister Robert Persaud to remove the deep-seated irregularities in the relationships between miners and state officials, one stakeholder says, will have to be “a tough and ruthless process” that will reveal just how “corrupt” the system has become and the inability of the state to properly monitor “the operational procedures” associated with the mining of gold.
Last week, Stabroek Business published a report based on an exclusive with a local gold miner who, during the interview, alluded to “routine irregularities” in the relationships between some miners and some officials of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC). According to the miner, the idea of setting up a committee to investigate GGMC officials over allegations of corruption are unlikely to bear much fruit since the nature of the corrupt transactions meant it was in the interest of neither the miners or the officials who are being accused of corruption to provide evidence that would help such an investigation.
Positing that illegal and irregular practices were “inevitable” in the gold mining sector, the miner told Stabroek Business he believed that “reducing – not removing but reducing” – the level of corruption in the gold mining industry would involve the setting up of a monitoring structure which required “a permanent and rotating group of inspectors” who are actually “on the ground” in gold-mining areas. “There is no way that the same group of GGMC mines officers can pay periodic visits to gold mining areas to monitor operational irregularities without at some stage being made an offer to look the other way,” the miner said.
He added that while a thorough enough investigation was likely to “turn up evidence of some illegal practices” some of cases are likely to involve officials who have now “moved on”.
At the recent meeting with sector stakeholders Minister Persaud said his ministry was mulling the setting up of an inspectorate outside the GGMC to investigate various matters in the sector. The miner said he had noted the announcement by the minister and his immediate response was to wonder whether the ministry would be “importing inspectors from another planet”.
According to the miner, who told Stabroek Business that he had been in the sector “long enough to understand how corruption works,” it was “virtually impossible” to put a system in place that would eradicate the problem. “Sooner or later, people will be corrupted. However tight the system may be the returns from corruption will provide an incentive for people to find a way around that system.”
According to the miner while there was “good reason” for government to exercise a greater measure of control over “aspects of the mining industry that had to do with the environment and with collecting royalties from gold” there are “deep suspicions on the part of the miners” that it “wants to do more than that.” In this regard he pointed to what he said was a relatively recent interest in gold mining “by people who have never come anywhere near mining in the past” and who have some influence in the society. “It would surprise you to know some of the people who are mining gold these days,” the miner told Stabroek Business. The Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) has also alluded to what it says are suspicions on the part of small miners that they are being pushed out of the industry.
And according to the miner interviewed by Stabroek Business the relatively recent interest in the mining sector by “new investors” was a function of rising gold prices and the recognition that “as a means of making a profit it was a better bet than trading on the high street… They see it as a means of making as much as possible as quickly as possible so that they can get out of the business once the price begins to fall,” he added.
“It really is a matter of the minister convincing the miners that this new ministry has been set up to do what it has to do to regulate the industry without creating fears that at the end of the day it will become a playground for people who are well-connected,” the miner said.
