Professor Nana Ama Klutse, the Chief Executive Officer of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), has detailed the event that led to the accident during the agency’s anti-galamsey operation.
According to the EPA CEO, her team’s vehicle got involved in the crash while they were fleeing for their lives from heavily built and armed galamseyers.
The EPA CEO revealed the soldiers said they couldn’t overpower the heavily armed galamseyers, so they had to run for their lives.
Speaking in an interview on TV3, Professor Nana Ama Klutse narrated, “As the operation we started yesterday (Wednesday, November 5), it’s a three-week plan that the EPA has, to ensure, especially the services that others provide for mining in our water bodies, which is illegal, we plan to tackle that aspect as well”.
“So we realised that it is not just enough to say, stop mining in the river bodies, but we saw that we needed to deal with the suppliers.”
“On our way near Obuasi, we saw galamsey happening on the ground, so we decided to have a look at what they were doing. When we stopped and walked into the area, as we were getting closer, they were running away, and all of them had left by the time we got there”.
She added, “We looked around for what we could pick, and we did pick. While leaving, we saw that there were actually more of the excavators, three, that were inside a river body; they had mined in the river and blocked the river in such a way that it had taken different tributaries around the area and flooded some places. It is messy. It was really a bad situation.”
“We had the military with us, and the national security also were with us, but then we saw that we couldn’t exchange fire or we could not fight them, so we had to run for our lives. So in the course of running, speeding on the road, we encountered this accident,” she narrated.
The EPA boss described the galamseyers as heavily built men were dressed in black with CID written on the back.
She further detailed, “Some of the heavily built men were dressed in black with CID written on the back. The soldiers and the national security men asked them for their ID cards, but it became confrontational, and so we had to leave because they said they could not overpower them”.
“While they were having the confrontation, we got intel from Accra that we should leave immediately, where we were and that even the route we planned to take, we should not use it again… we had to use another route altogether, much longer through the Western Region, the Central Region to Kumasi, but just before we reached Kumasi is when we had the head-on collision,” she explained.
Professor Nana Ama Klutse further detailed the intent of the injuries sustained by the journalists, “We thank God that we all have our lives now, it is just unfortunate that we have some injuries. The most critical one is a broken thigh, which is one of the Joy TV cameramen. Abubarkar has some chest pains, and he is responding to treatment.
Adom TV’s correspondent had a head injury; he is also responding to treatment. Then we have some EPA staff who were also involved in the accident; they are all responding to treatment. We have discussed it with the doctors and nurses in charge to pay special attention to them because we were on a national assignment before this unfortunate incident happened.”
Watch the video below:
The soldiers said they couldn’t overpower the heavily armed galamseyers so we had to run for our lives – EPA CEO Professor Nana Ama Klutse on accident.#3NewsGH #TV3GH pic.twitter.com/GcjfBuEwRq
— #TV3GH (@tv3_ghana) November 7, 2025