Seth J. Bokpe's Ghana Newsreel

The Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) has called on the Ministry of Transport to suspend the implementation of the Urban Transport Project (UTP) until all affected persons and organisations reach a common understanding on its fundamental objectives and benefits. The GPRTU said the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, one of the interventions in the project, was a calculated attempt to stifle the private road transport sector, especially inner-city transport. The US$95 million UTP was launched in 2007 to improve upon urban mobility in Ghana. The project is expected to be implemented over a five-year period. It seeks to change the face of public transportation and reduce congestion in the cities as a result of Ghana’s growing urbanisation. Addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday at which members of the union wore red bands on their heads and sang war songs, the General Secretary of the GPRTU, Mr Alando Sidik, said the BRT would put a lot of people out of job and also agg...

THE Attorney-General’s Department is drafting a code of conduct for prosecutors to ensure greater transparency, accountability and efficiency in their work. The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu, made this known at a symposium organised by Lawyers in Search of Democracy (LINSOD), a non-governmental organisation (NGO). Speaking on the theme, “The Law as a Tool for Consolidating Democracy in Ghana”, Mrs Mould-Iddrisu said, “No democratic system can be sustained for long without a common recognition of the fact that the system of justice and the application of laws are blind to fame and rank — that all are equal before the law.” She said while Ghanaians had generally shown a fair understanding of the democratic system in Ghana, the law continued to be seen by majority of the populace as an inaccessible, strange system of complicated rules and mystical principles. She described as sad the perception that the administration of law and justice in the count...

Cost of medicines for effective Malaria control to reduce) GHANA will, by August this year, introduce a system that will significantly reduce the cost of medicines for the effective treatment of malaria from GH¢10 to GH¢3 for the next two years. Other countries to benefit from the initiative are Cambodia, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. Dubbed, Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMF-m), the project is an innovative financing mechanism to expand access to affordable Artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) for the treatment of malaria, thereby saving lives and reducing the use of inappropriate treatment. The initiative will facilitate the increased use of ACT by reducing the cost of those drugs in malaria-endemic countries and also ensuring that additional activities are carried out to assist in the safe and effective implementation of AFM-m. This was made known in Accra when the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP), in conjunction with the Johns...

An aspirant to the New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearership for the 2012 elections, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has called on the youth to help turn around the future of the country by voting out the National Democratic Congress(NDC) in 2012 in order to better their lot. He pledged his commitment to making education the foundation stone of his administration when elected President. Nana Akufo-Addo was addressing a student gathering at the Mensah Sarbah Hall of the University of Ghana, on the theme “There is hope for the youth”. He said education was the key to human development which not only widens life’s options for individuals and society but also the key to the development of the nation and a healthy democracy. He said, “no country had been able to shed the evils of poverty, ignorance and disease with a largely illiterate population,“ adding that education remained the bedrock on which Ghana’s economic development could be spurred. According to him, the Junior Secondary S...

A Former Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Mr Christian Appiah-Agyei, has called on the labour union to champion a review of the law that bans staff of para-military organisations from forming unions to fight for their interest. He said all workers in the country had the fundamental right to form or join a trade union, as was the case in many jurisdictions across the globe. The Labour Act (651) of 2003 bars members of the security services, including para-military organisations specified under the Security and Intelligence Agencies Act (526) of 1996, from forming workers’ unions. Mr Appiah-Agyei was speaking at a forum organised by the TUC as part of activities marking this year’s International Workers Day (May Day) which falls on May 1, each year. In Ghana, this year’s celebration, which is on theme, “Consolidating Workers Solidarity and the Legacy of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah”, is dedicated to Dr Nkrumah’s memory for his role in helping to establish a strong ...

A security expert, Dr Kwesi Aning, has called for more stringent small arms policies in Ghana to reduce armed crimes and curtail the manufacture of small arms locally. He said in order to prevent the growth of the illicit arms trade, there was the need to review the current process of the importation of small weapons. Dr Aning was addressing a press conference after the opening ceremony of the Maiden Course in Small Arms and Light Weapons and the launch of the Communications Strategy for the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC). The two-week programme, which has more than 90 participants drawn from 15 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries, is expected to reduce the proliferation of small arms in the sub-region and is also a step towards the implementation of the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons. The participants would be taken through stockpile management, border control management and the processes of tracing and...

18.04.10 Housing and slums (gn) Story: Seth J. Bokpe THE demolition of unauthorised structures in the country would be an exercise in futility, if the National Housing Policy is not passed, a Former President of the Ghana Institute of Architects, Mr Steve Akuffo has observed. Mr Akuffo made the observation in a presentation entitled ”Urban Housing and Slum and Real Estate Development in Ghana“ at a Colloquium organised by the GIA to deliberate on issues concerning the housing sector in the country and the way forward. The National Housing Policy which is expected to regulate the real estate sector in the country has been on the table since 1987. Available information indicates that the annual national housing requirement is 140,000 units with a supply of about 45,000 units per annum with the national housing deficit said to be 1 million. According to the Building and Road Research Institute, housing delivery in Ghana is dominated by private individuals whose contribution i...

GHANA needs to exercise caution in the review of the 1992 Constitution in order not to slow down the country’s development, Dr Vladmir Antwi-Danso, a Senior Fellow at the Legon Centre for International Affairs of the University of Ghana, has advised. He observed that even though several grey areas had been identified in the 1992 Constitution because the country had tested it enough and could now afford to make those changes, “we must hasten slowly” as, in his opinion, the more wordy a constitution is, the more it made the development process slow and cumbersome. Dr Antwi-Danso was giving a presentation entitled “ Constitutional dilemma: the Ghanaian situation” at roundtable discussion on the topic “The Omission of Provision on a defecting President or a vacant or inoperative Vice President”, which was organised in Accra by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). The discussion attracted ministers of state, Members of Parliament (MPs), leaders of political parties and the aca...

SOME residents of Adenta in Accra have turned a section of the West Africa Senior High School into a refuse dump, resulting in unbearable stench in the school that is affecting academic work. The mountain of rubbish is made up of leftover food, plastic materials, human excreta and saw dust. The residents, some of whom have been ejected from the streets of Adenta to pave way for the construction of the Madina-Aburi road, have relocated their structures along the wall of the school. They sneak under the cover of darkness to throw away rubbish, which has risen above the wall, while others are said to scale the wall to ease themselves on the school compound, sometimes in broad daylight. When the Daily Graphic visited the school, several spots of human excreta were found scattered on the football field and close to the basketball and tennis courts. The otherwise serene atmosphere was filled with unpleasant stench that some students told the Daily Graphic was also affecting sporting...

THE Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, the Most Rev Prof Emmanuel Asante, has advised members of the church to use the appropriate structures within the church to address their grievances, instead of resorting to demonstrations and acts that will bring Christ and the name of the church into disrepute. The Bishop gave the advice when he led the top hierarchy of the church, including the Administrative Bishop, Rt Rev Asamoah Okyere; the Diocesan Bishop of Accra, Rt Rev Abraham Tagoe; the Lay President of the Methodist Bishops Conference, Mrs Araba Ata-Sam, and the Lay Chairman of the Accra Diocese, Mr Tim Acquah Hayford, to resolve the impasse between the church leadership and the Teshie North Methodist Church over the transfer of the resident Minister, Rev Ishmael Ghansah. The confusion brought Easter Sunday church activities to a halt, as members wore red apparel and armbands to register their displeasure at the transfer of their resident minister to the Police Church at ...

The President, Professor John Evans Atta Mills, has assured Ghanaians that the government will ensure transparency and accountability in all dealings. He said this was necessary to ensure that revenue and other resources accruing to the state could be used to the benefit of all Ghanaians and not a selected few. The President said this in a speech read on his behalf by the Deputy Minister of Education, Dr Joseph S. Annan, at the third graduation ceremony of the Regent University College of Science and Technology in Accra. According to President Mills, “Everybody in the position of responsibility is a leader in one way or the other and should examine his or her conduct and attitude to the needs of the society.” He said university education in the country needed to be positioned to meet the changing needs of the country’s economy and the demands of globalisation. “In order to meet these challenges, we need to develop curricular and as well as employ teaching and learning techniq...

Ghana is to host two major international Information Communication Technology (ICT) conferences this year. They are aimed at improving ICT infrastructure in the rural areas in addition to the management of the country’s telephony number planning and number convergence. The two conferences — the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Workshop on Numbering Planning and Convergence of Numbering scheduled for April 28-30, and the Fifth Annual Connecting Rural Communities Forum scheduled for August 17-19, this year — are under the auspices of the ITU, the Ministry of Communication and the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation. A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme that makes use of a country code, national destination code and a subscriber number to allocate and route telephone numbers in a telephone network, while numbering convergence allows users to have one number that could ring in multiple locations and on multiple devices. It could also consolida...

Zain, Ghana has presented a cheque for GH¢ 37,500 to the first winner of its on-going customer loyalty campaign, “Live Your Dream Too”. Mr Samuel Nana Mireku won the amount after playing the Reward Game Show, which was held at his residence at Kwashieman in Accra. The Reward Game Show is another phase of the promotion in which the weekly winner is presented with a game board with 16 numbers, each representing a cash value. Out of those numbers, the winner picks three numbers and walks away with the total of what is picked. If the winner picks all the three numbers with a Zain logo, he or she banks GH¢75,000. The occasion attracted a large crowd and Mr Mireku, surrounded by his wife and two children, picked GH¢5,000, GH¢ 12,500 and a Zain logo worth GH¢ 25,000, attracting a big applause from the thrilled crowd. Mr Mireku told the Daily Graphic that he would invest the money in building a house for himself as his current residence is a rented premises. “ I have a dream of bu...

THE seventh branch of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) has been inaugurated at the Institute of Professional Studies (IPS) at Legon with a pledge to partner stakeholders in the country’s educational system to move the country’s educational sector forward. The membership of the association includes lecturers from the country’s public universities, namely, the University of Ghana, Legon, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, the University of Cape Coast (UCC), University of Education Winneba, the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) at Tarkwa, and the University of Development Studies (UDS) in Tamale. The UTAG is a non-partisan, non-profit oriented and non-political organisation formed in 1968 with the objective to promote the welfare of university teachers, promote common action among university lecturers and ensure the improvement of channels of communication and relations among the different sections of the university com...

Ghana’s socio-economic challenges have been blamed on the number of productive hours Ghanaians spend observing religious practices. A senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Ghana, Prof Max Assimeng, made the observation at the launch of the second edition of his book, “Religion and Social Change in West Africa”, at a ceremony in Accra. The 291-page book, published by Woeli Publishing Services, examines sociology and religion and analyses the dynamics of religion in the West African sub-region. Prof Assimeng said the country had failed to make economic progress because “in any country where there is too much religion, economic activity goes down”. According to him, Ghanaians had taken religion too far, as “we have downplayed the role of the economic sector and rather spend hours on all-nights, deliverance and anointing services”. He said Ghanaians needed to strike a balance between the time spent on religious and commercial activities to move the ...

he Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL) will give credence to the programmes and activities of Brand Ghana that are aimed at projecting the image of the country, the General Manager in charge of Newspapers of the company, Mr Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafoh, has stated. He said the company bought into the idea of branding the country because it was in the collective interest of Ghanaians to see a thriving national image. Mr Boadu-Ayeboafoh made the remark when a delegation from Brand Ghana (BG), led by its Chief Executive Officer, Mr Mathias Akotia, visited the company as part of consultations with stakeholders to craft a vision and framework of operations to guide its work. Present at the meeting were the editors of some of the company’s chain of newspapers, including Mr Ransford Tetteh of the Daily Graphic, Mrs Margaret Safo of The Mirror, Ms Victoria Odoi, Assistant Editor of the Junior Graphic, and Mr Emmanuel Agyei Arthur, the Public Affairs Co-ordinator. The BG was established...

The Member of Parliament (MP) for the East Ayawaso Constituency, Dr Mustapha Ahmed, has invested more than GH¢4,600 of his share of the MPs Common Fund in the first quarter of 2010 , in various educational interventions aimed at improving academic performance in the constituency. Dr Ahmed who is also the Deputy Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing presented an amount of GH¢ 3,105 to the East Ayawaso Educational Development Committee to sponsor 21 brilliant but needy students from the constituency who are in second-cycle and tertiary institutions. The MP also donated stationery worth GH¢1,500 to the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates of 24 junior high schools in the constituency. Some of the beneficiary schools located in Kanda, Nima, Maamobi, Kotobabi and Accra New Town include; the Kanda Cluster of Junior High Schools (JHS), Aggrey Memorial School, St Cecilia JHS , the Nima Cluster of Schools, St Kizito R/C 1 and 5 JHS, Adab Islamic Mission, ...

THE usual hustle and bustle that characterises trading activities at Kantamanto and Abossey Okai in the central business district (CBD) will be missing from today, as most of the traders who are Kwahus prepare to visit their home towns in the Kwahu area for the Easter festivities. A visit to Kantamanto and Abossey Okai yesterday showed that the usual customer call was at its peak, as second-hand cloth and spare parts dealers made frantic efforts to attract customers and make good sales. Abossey Okai and Kantamanto have become the home of hundreds of Kwahus and the epicentre of the trade in spare parts and second-hand clothing, popularly known as "obroni wawu". At Kantamanto, a few of the second-hand cloth dealers who spoke to the Daily Graphic said even though sales had been generally low over the past month, the week leading to Easter had seen a sharp increase in demand for clothes. "Beach wear has been on very hot demand this week and I am capitalising on that to d...