Director of Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, Professor Kwesi Aning, has asserted that notorious illegal small-scale mining kingpin, Aisha Huang is a Chinese spy who is waging economic warfare on the country.
In a September 7 interview with Accra-based Joy FM, Prof Aning anchored his argument on the reasons given by the state for the deportation of the Chinese national in 2018 when she was arrested for illegal mining activities otherwise known as galamsey.
According to him, Aisha Huang was no ordinary person if the influence she wielded could affect the Sino-Hydro loan the country was seeking from China at the time of her deportation.
He believes the galamsey kingpin is engaging in galamsey activities to pollute the country’s waterbodies which will eventually affect cocoa crops.
“There’s a massive institutionalized trafficking scheme enabled by high-level corruption and collusion. And we find this in galamsey. In the Rosewood criminal enterprise, the Chinese merchant involved or the state agencies involved is Huang Yan Chen also known as Helena Huang so what we are looking at is that these criminal enterprises are not just by ordinary people.
“These are state agents who are almost untouchable because if we go back to the 2017 and 2018 escape of Aisha Huang and the argument that she has been released because we were looking for the Sino-Hydro loan and that was she to be prosecuted, it would affect the loan, then Aisha is not an ordinary Chinese gangster. She’s an agent of the state. She’s a spy.
“And her expertise is in economic warfare; deliberately destroying our environment and our water bodies through galamsey so that the cyanide and the mercury will go through our underground water, come through the food chain, and destroy the cocoa crop.
And we know that Japan in particular which loved our cocoa beans is now disturbed because they found traces of chemicals in our cocoa beans. So we need to elevate this conversation over and above ordinary people stealing excavators,” Prof Aning said.
Aisha Huang was recently arrested for engaging in galamsey-related activities. She is reported to have entered the country via the Togo border after her deportation.
Aisha Huang has since been remanded by an Accra High Court and is set to reappear with three others on September 14.
The Attorney General’s office has also assured that it will prosecute Aisha Huang for her past and present crimes.
It will be recalled that Aisha Huang gained notoriety as an illegal mining kingpin in 2017. She was arrested for the same conduct but later deported with the state discontinuing the trial against her.
Justifying why the state had to deport the Chinese national, the Senior Minister, Nana Yaw Osafo Maafo, addressing some concerns of Ghanaians in the diaspora at a town hall meeting on April 18, 2019, revealed that,
“Putting that woman [Aisha Huang] in jail in Ghana is not going to solve your money problem. It is not going to make you happy or me happy.”
But President Akufo-Addo in 2019 said the deportation of the Chinese galamsey kingpin was a ‘mistake’.
