Mustapha Hamid, Spokesperson to the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, has stated that party’s ‘one village, one dam’ proposal for northern Ghana, is actually a promise to provide an irrigation system in all villages.
The NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, had promised to establish one dam in every village in the northern part of the country to boost agriculture raising questions of the prudence and feasibility of such an endeavor.
[contextly_sidebar id=”8E5IJ3MczYbqkctDcJj7EItQ9HVPLQ8b”]But Mustapha Hamid indicated that Nana Addo’s words were not to be taken literally as he was communicating in a context that required the use of the word “dam”.
“When you come to this part of the country, their understanding of irrigation is a dam. Communications is a contextual matter; therefore he had to later on say one dam, one village because that is what the people understand,” he explained on Eyewitness News.
Clarifying his point with an analogy, he noted that, “It’s like your grandmother in the village asking you to go and buy her Pepsodent. By Pepsodent, she doesn’t mean Pepsodent so-called; but she just means toothpaste. So when I say mummy take Pepsodent, I may actually be giving her Colgate.”
Irrigation projects will vary
Mustapha Hamid indicated that “every village will have an irrigation system that will irrigate their land. The details of it will come at the implementation stage.”
“There are certain villages that per the population the density may not need full blown dams. Some can even be irrigated by a number of boreholes and pumping the water to the farms and so on so there are various options… so there are what you call receptacles, full blown dams, there are dugouts and there are bore holes,” he added.
1 dam, 1 village not feasible – Agric Minister
The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Alhaji Limuna Mohammed Muniru, however has little faith in Nana Addo’s promise despite stating the that “we can no longer depend on rain fed agriculture so it is important to look at issues of irrigation.”
Also speaking on Eyewitness News, he simply said, “I don’t think this is very possible and I cannot support campaign promises, just promises that somebody wants to win elections with… If he has decided to go and be promising dams to every village in the northern part of the country, I don’t think that is feasible.”
Alhaji Muniru further stated that, government was already engaging in some projects that would expand irrigation with a more calculated strategy.
As an example, he noted that, “we have put in legislation instruments that have been passed under the Water User’s Association Act… that gives the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority the regulator and ownership of publicly funded irrigation schemes.”
He also said, “we have the Ghana Commercial Agriculture Project and they are pumping 3000 hectares rain water harvest irrigation scheme in an area called Nasia Nabogo and under this, 48 hectares have already been developed and 385 hectares under cultivation.”
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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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