A pro New Patriotic Party (NPP) group, calling itself Burma Camp Youth, has defended its decision to blatantly close down the Northern Regional office of the School Feeding Programme in Tamale.
Chairman of the group, Kamel Yusif, explained that their protest was necessary due to what they describe as challenges bedeviling the school feeding programme under the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).
[contextly_sidebar id=”HJfvYMhtQCiLFxyiZXueSPzhmjDQy79u”]“The youth has realized that, the school feeding programme is not going the way we expected. We realized that when we sit down and allow things to go the way they are, the School Feeding Programme will not succeed particularly in the northern part of Ghana.
“When we conducted our investigations, those who have been given the monitoring appointment should be reporting to the Minister herself not the Regional Coordinator. We also have close to ten ethnic groups, but the monitoring appointment was given to about five individuals and one ethnic group. We thought that the appointment should have been fairly distributed,” Mr. Kamel explained.
The group on Monday October 16, 2017, chased out the Regional Coordinator and staff, and locked up the offices over what they call unfair allocation of schools in the region to caterers.
But Mr. Kamel on Eyewitness News strongly defended the group’s decision, saying “we know we are doing the right thing. We are not doing anything that is against anyone’s rights.”
“We love the party (NPP) and whatever we will do to make sure that the party succeeds, we will do it.”
He further dismissed suggestions that, the group has threatened to beat up School Feeding caterers who ignore their warnings, adding that the group locked up the regional office and not district offices of the programme as earlier suggested.
Group’s earlier concerns
The group’s Chairman, Mohammed Kamil, in a Citi News interview had early on, accused the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Otiko Afisa Djaba, of hijacking the allocation exercise.
He posited that, she allocated five schools each to her cronies, and also designated them as monitors.
This, according to Mohammed Kamil, has created tension in the region, hence the group’s action.
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By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana