Plugging the gold declaration idiosyncrasy

Dear Editor,

I have a 9-point road map to plug the gold under declaration haemorrhage. It’s inconceivable for gold declaration to be declining over the past five years when gold price has been breaking all records! This is not good business acumen! The Guyana Gold Board and the Mines Division have embarrassed the Government of Guyana big time….Unless of course they worked under instructions? At such high levels, ethics ought to prevail round the clock.

In 1974, when I worked at the Mines Division in Georgetown, one of my tasks was to plot the weekly gold declaration on a chart. Since then, my 50 years of global mining experience, two decades in the gold belt of Central Africa, recommends:

1. Visit each gold camp for a week under the guise of rendering gold-recovery support to establishing true production. This will be compared with declared production.
2. Encourage the miners to declare true production. Such figures can be used to obtain a loan from the lending agencies. This will form the basis of an annual gold production certificate.
3. Stimulate the miners to declare true production/sales as this will be the modus operandi of a possible sale, or merger. The formula being: value of asset = 3 x annual sale
4. Check on workers who suddenly take a day’s leave and stay in camp. Are they taking a laxative while in camp? Some workers have been known to swallow nuggets while diving!
5. Can the mine afford a body scanner? It can be used to scan each worker leaving the production area.
6. Ban the flight of drones over the mining areas apart from those on medical missions and forestry surveillance duties.
7. All motor vehicles must be thoroughly searched at the borders. Examination ramps must be constructed at such borders to check vehicles for false bottoms.
8. Body scanners must be installed at all borders.
9. A mining camp should be a restricted area. Entry of outsiders should be prohibited, unless by prior arrangement. By corollary, employed miners should be debarred from leaving the camp between the hours of 18:00 and 06:00. Such curfew should be rigorously enforced.

Yours truly,

Ken Seecharran.