Disclosing this at the inauguration of the Bolga East district in Zuarungu, the Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, Joseph Kofi Adda, said the intervention will address the alarming rate of open defecation.

“When it comes to open defecation, out of ten people, only one person uses  a toilet facility and the remaining nine defecate in public and this is not good enough for our health.  But on my part as a Minister, I have made available fifty toilet facilities for construction this year for the Bolga East District. This will contribute towards reducing the menace of open defecation and aid in our quest to achieving the sustainable development goal six”.

Mr. Adda was also optimistic that, the district’s water challenges would soon be resolved when the $42m Tono water treatment plant construction is finally completed.

He hinted that government was about concluding a credit facility from the World Bank to develop and construct the Pwalugu Multi-Purpose dam which will add  250 megawatts of electricity to the national grid and facilitate irrigation farming in the district.

Member of Parliament for Bolga East, Dr. Dominic Ayine, lauded government for the creation of the district and urged Assembly members to eschew  petty partisanship disagreements which would retard the development of the area.

He appealed to land owners to release land for the construction of the district assembly office block and other structures which befit the status of a district.

He also wants government to facilitate the completion of  the Zuarungu market to support the assembly generate revenue for development.

The Bolga East District Assembly is currently using the Ministry of Food and Agriculture office block as its   temporary office block.

Inauguration of Tempane and Garu Districts

The Garu and Tempane districts were also inaugurated respectively at the  Tempane park.

Upper East Regional Minister Rockson Bukari, said the creation of the two districts was evident that government is committed to bring development to the doorsteps of the people.

Zoonlion Ghana also supported the district with ten tricycles and thirty waste bins.

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By: Frederick Awuni/citifmonline.com/Ghana

The post Newly inaugurated Bolga East district to get 50 toilet facilities  appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

Although I’m suspicious of politicians who always say the right things, I found Nana Addo’s speeches on the campaign trail inspiring. There was a sense of urgency in his statements, something that said he believed Ghana could do better for its citizens. I suspect this is because his predecessor, an alleged communications expert, rarely said anything profound and was stunningly incompetent. There was something else too: I recognized from all his speeches that Nana Akufo-Addo meant well and wanted to do more with the little that Ghana had. His inaugural address at the Black Star Square where he said many refreshing and uplifting things, such as, “Sixty years after attaining nationhood, we no longer have any excuses for being poor,” had me swooning. Finally, I thought, we had a man who hated mediocrity and was going to right the wrongs.

It has been one year and three months since President Akufo-Addo’s awe-inspiring inaugural speech and my faith in him is flickering at best and extinguished at worst. Here is why: In 2017 he established a Sanitation Ministry, promised to spend 200 million Ghana cedis to clean Ghana and then announced that he was going to make Accra the cleanest city on the continent. I didn’t consider the Sanitation Ministry a useful creation, but I yielded, believing it may be what the government needs to finally free us from the filth drowning us across the country. But a year after that declaration, Accra is still submerged under piles of rubbish and I don’t see a coherent way forward. To think that donor agency recently paid for adverts in newspapers urging Ghanaians not to practice open defecation! (A 2012  United Word Bank report revealed that 19 percent of Ghanaians practice open defecation)

Not only am I horrified that Accra, the capital where the president lives, still stinks, but I’m also disappointed that all the excellent talk has yielded nothing. If a government cannot assemble a team to achieve one of its key promises, why should I believe it can change how we live in four years?

Again, in February 2017, a month after taking office, he launched activities for the celebration of Ghana’s 60th Independence anniversary at the Flagstaff House. The plan was for the 30-member planning committee to raise the 20 million Ghana cedis budgeted for the year-long celebration from the private sector.  We were supposed to get monuments (libraries, schools, and museums), what the president termed legacy projects, in all ten regions in addition to concerts, plays and football matches. But very little happened after the grand celebration on March 6, which according to Ken Amankwah, the chairman of the planning committee was because they could not raise funds. End of story.

These failures are significant because he has promised us a Ghana beyond aid, a promise for which he has received huge applause from both Ghanaians and the donor community. The premise for this new maxim is that Ghana(ergo Africa)  has enough resources to fend for itself to be entirely independent of aid. This same man whose team couldn’t complete basic year-long celebrations wants to end Ghana’s dependence on foreign aid. Speaking at the presser with Emmanual Macron, the president called for a change of mindset, saying, “Our concern should be what do we need to do in this 21st century to move Africa away from being cup-in-hand and begging for aid, for charity, for handouts. The African continent, when you look at its resources, should be giving money to other places.”

I wish I were as impressed as the people who have been praising Nana Addo for this decision. But I resent how he and his team have framed the narrative to the delight of many Western ambassadors in Ghana (the US ambassador to Ghana has called him a visionary) as though we depend entirely on aid and the West is doing us a favor by giving us support. It’s irritating because, like all countries that suffered slavery and colonization, Ghana deserves donor aid. We’re entitled to it, and we should take it until we get reparations for the plundering of our human and natural resources. Finance blogger, Jerome Kuseh, captures the context in this tweet: “The failure to properly contextualize why Africa needs aid is to play into the historically and economically conservative western ideology which portrays African states as leeches of European nations.”

Aid to Ghana has been decreasing too. Currently, direct foreign aid to our government is estimated at a mere 3.43 percent of government revenue, or 0.7 percent of our GDP. That means a little more than 300  million dollars or a quarter of the stolen money that the Auditor General wants back.  The picture Nana Addo paints is therefore incomplete. Our problems do not exist because of our dependence on aid. We have housing, education, healthcare, and transportation challenges because our leaders waste whatever we make from our natural resources and taxes, they fail to plan, and they’re inept at executing.

To be fair, Nana Addo’s government has done quite a bit since it took office. It has stabilized the economy and the cedi-dollar relationship isn’t giving business folk as many headaches. The cost of living hasn’t gone down, but we are not paying a different price for toothpaste every month. They have not added as much to the enormous debt stock left by his predecessor; instead, they are paying off some of the debt. The government has started the process of making the National Health Insurance Scheme and the Pension fund, which were mismanaged and nearly bankrupted, solvent again. And they have established the Office of the Special Prosecutor and implemented their free senior high school education policy.  Given that this government inherited an almost empty treasury and an unstable economy, these accomplishments should be celebrated.

Given the low bar set by John Mahama, I can understand why Nana Addo is earning massive praise for these achievements, but as they say, the devil is always in the details. In the period Nana Addo claims to be working to end our dependence on aid, he is giving prime state lands, worth tens of millions of dollars, for the construction of a national cathedral even though Ghana has more churches than factories. Factories, the base industrialized nations used to create viable economies so their citizens can live in dignity. On Ghana’s 61st independence anniversary, he launched the design for the cathedral while his government still hasn’t provided the plan or the template for its so-called one-district-one-factory project.

Instead of harping on about the future of Ghana without aid, I would greatly appreciate it if Nana Addo spent more time completing simple tasks like getting us road signs, street lights, passports and licenses without bribes and clean towns and cities. And to be more honest, making sure our country is free of filth, a situation that endangers our lives and costs the government tens of million dollars would be more appropriate and reasonable.  I want Ghana to be free from handouts and foreign control, but if a government cannot even raise funds locally to fund a year-long independence celebration, can we even trust it to tackle public corruption? And possibly free us from the grips of western donors?

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By: Nyamewaa

The post How about Ghana beyond filth? [Article] appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

He says although government owes Zoomlion, they ought not to have reneged on their duties of sweeping and collecting refuse in the country.

“Today being engulfed with filth and finding solid waste everywhere, I feel a little disappointed and if you were to ask me why this state is so, I will put the blame squarely on Zoomlion. Zoomlion to me is the cause of it. Why, because they are not sweeping and collecting refuse every day,” he said at a sanitation forum organized by the Graphic Communications Group in Accra today, Friday.

Zoomlion, a private company, has over 60,00 workers employed under the sanitation module of the Youth Employment Agency who sweep the streets and others who collect refuse from various destinations to dump sites as well as other services.

Government pays the workers dotted across the country through Zoomlion, an amount many say is woefully inadequate.

But the company, which has been in operation since 2006 has lamented that it is owed huge sums of money by successive governments.

According to the company, it has dispensed services to the state over the years including dredging huge drains which usually caused flooding in the country but has not been paid.

We owe you huge monies but you continue to work

According to Mr. Adda, despite the debt, Zoomlion should still have discharged its duties as expected of it.

“I don’t think the past year or so Zoomlion has done so well on that. I know you’ve been constrained just like any other service providers, you’ve not been paid regularly, we owe you huge debts, we need to pay you but the mere fact that you are engaged in sanitation activity in every assembly…the mere fact that you’ve been present in every assembly and you know how it started, you know what you are supposed to be doing, so even if you are constrained…continue to work even though you are not being paid regularly,” he added.

We can deal with filth – Zoomlion boss

Also speaking at the event, the Chief Executive Officer of Zoomlion, Joseph Siaw Agyepong, said they are capable of dealing with sanitation issues in the country but urged government to fast track the payments.

“The solution of waste management in Ghana is here, we shouldn’t look outside, Zoomlion and its partners can deal with it and we have already put the infrastructure in place.”

“Mr. Adda, I want to assure you that you have the serious support of Zoomlion and its partners we will help you to deliver,” he assured the Sanitation Minister.

YEA to ‘dump’ Zoomlion for other sanitation service providers

The management of the Youth Employment Agency [YEA], recently served notice they will take on new service providers to handle its Youth in Sanitation Module from June this year [2018], when the government’s contract with Zoomlion, a subsidiary of the Jospong Group of Companies expires.

YEA says the decision has become necessary following its assessment of Zoomlion’s service rendered to successive governments since the company was established in 2006.

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By: Godwin Akweiteh Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin

The post Blame Zoomlion for filth in Ghana  – Sanitation Minister appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.