About 140,000 people are being deprived of safe drinking water in the Obuasi Municipality and its surroundings because of the menace of illegal small-scale mining (galamsey).

The Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources (MSWR), Ms Cecilia Abena Dapaah, bemoaned this and said galamsey activities on the Oda river in Odaso in the Obuasi Municipality, makes it impossible for the water treatment plant close to the river to operate at full capacity.

“Looking at the fact that the capacity of the water treatment plant is four million gallons of safe water a day, but instead, it is doing one million gallons for the whole of Obuasi and its surroundings all because of galamsey on the river Oda is sad and worrying,” Ms Dapaah lamented.

Ms Dapaah said these when she paid a working visit to the Oda river in Odaso in the Ashanti Region, as part of her four-day working tour of water bodies in the Eastern and Ashanti regions.

She was sad at the muddy state of the river, which provides potable water for thousands of residents in Obuasi and its satellite communities.

She said her interactions with the residents of Odaso indicated that they were constantly being threatened with machetes and locally manufactured guns by the galamseyers.

She called on every Ghanaian to join in the fight against galamsey to save the country’s water bodies.