Former Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Professor Kwesi Yankah, has urged the country not to commit troops to the West African Standing Force to fight the military junta in Niger. The ECOWAS Committee of Chiefs of the Defence Staff indicated its readiness to deploy the standby force to intervene in Niger at a recent extraordinary two-day meeting in Accra, but is awaiting authorization from the sub-region’s bloc heads. Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the launch of his book titled “The Pen At Risk, Spilling My Little Beans”, Professor Yankah urged the military to focus on pressing internal issues like illegal mining, also known as “galamsey”. “Let anybody undertake research into the volume of arms in the forest as we speak, controlled by the galamsey people. Nobody has even touched the tip of the iceberg aspect. There’s a huge war and there can be an intrusion within the country at any time. I think maybe we should pay attention to the untouched issue of ‘galamsey’, which clearly demonstrates how powerless we are as a nation. If we cannot overcome galamsey, and I’m not saying that we can do it only with moral switching, it’s a combination of moral switching and physical action.” “Defend the integrity of our forest and natural resources. Because that is what we sit on, there is so much poverty, but there are resources beneath us that are controlled by just a few. Let’s liberate the resources and let people realise that we have soldiers, let them first deal with the galamsey within our territorial boundaries before they even venture outside”.