Former Chief Executive Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Dr. John Kingsley Krugu, has slammed the government’s new Blue Water Guards Initiative, describing it as a duplication of effort and a waste of resources.
Speaking on Channel One Newsroom, Dr. Krugu explained that under the previous government, Water Guards were already trained to protect water bodies, but they never got the chance to work due to confusion among state agencies.
“Under the previous government, Water Guards were trained. As the National Coordinator for Landscape Restoration and Small-Scale Mining then, I was part of the people who always went to the Naval Command to graduate these Water Guards. We have taken that route,” he revealed.
According to him, the trained guards couldn’t operate because of turf wars between the Minerals Commission, Water Resources Commission, and the Navy.
“As a matter of fact, those Water Guards never got to the field. It was about an institutional issue because you have the naval commander train them, then you have the Water Resources Commission, then you have the Minerals Commission.”
“If you are captured under the Minerals Commission, then the Water Resources will say they are in charge of the Water Bodies, then you have the Navy, so all of that did not amount to anything,” Dr. Krugu added.
He questioned the relevance of training another batch of Water Guards when the old problems of institutional confusion remain unsolved.
“Then suddenly I saw that we are going to train another group of people in the same thing. That is not the way to go,” he stressed.
