By Rashid Mbugri, GNA,
Accra, June 03, GNA – Residents within the Tamale Metropolis have expressed worry over the poor sanitation practices they faced in the due to poor waste management systems.
They said the poor sanitation problem had caused a lot of health challenges for the residents and appealed to government to come to their aid to solve the situation.
They blamed the situation on the limited number of refuse dumps and dustbins at vantage points leading to indiscriminate disposable of refuse and poor attitude of some residents towards practising good sanitation.
They made the appeal at the weekend in Tamale during a town hall meeting organised by the Catholic Archdiocese of Tamale in collaboration with the Justice and Peace Commission and the Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference.
The town hall meeting was aimed at bringing the residents together with the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly (TaMA) to interact and share developmental issues affecting them and how they could be addressed.
It was on the theme: « Community Participation in Local Governance for Rapid and Sustainable Development ».
The residents also appealed to TaMA to help curb the rate of streetism, and congestion at the Central market as well as solve the poor road situation in most of the areas within the metropolis.
The Rev. Father Thaddeus Kuusah, a representative of the Archbishop of Tamale said the town hall meeting was the first in 2019 after the Justice and Peace Commission organised nine (9) town hall meetings in 2018.
He said the meetibg also formed part of the second phase of the Tamale Ecclesiastical Pastoral Conference’s (TEPPCON), three (3) year, Civic Education project dubbed: « Strengthening Citizen Participation in Local Government in the Tamale Ecclesiastical Province ».
He said the second phase of the project was extended to cover more administrative districts such as Tamale Metro, Savelugu Municipality, Tolon district, Salaga district and Kpandai district.
He urged citizens to participate in all development processes with the view of bettering their communities and surrounding environs.
Alhaji Abdul Razak Saani, Northern Regional Director of the National Commission for Civil Education(NCCE)urged citizens to collectively participate in the development processes in their communities to ensure sustainable development and promote good governance.
This, he said, could only be achieved collectively when citizens and duty bearers recognised their roles and responsibilities in the country and participate collectively in the development process.
Mr Abdul Rahman Baba Ahmed, the Co-Ordinating Director of TaMA who spoke on behalf of the Tamale Metropolitan Chief Executive acknowledged their roles as duty bearers in delivering services to the citizenry, but said TaMA was faced with limited resources thereby slowing their pace in providing developments to the people.
He assured that the Assembly was doing its best to provide the needed infrastructure and services to the residents with the limited resources available.
Alhaji Inusah Abubakari, the Planning Officer of Tamale Metropolitan Assembly (TaMA) said the Assembly’s mode of mobilising resources to carry out developmental processes depended on the Assembly’s Internally Generated Fund (IGF), centralised transfers,and donations from individuals and NGOs.
He said the IGF was the main source of resource generation by the Assembly to help carry out development projects and services.
He, however, said there was difficulty in IGF generation due to the unwillingness of residents to pay their basic rate taxes and appealed to the residents to pay their taxes to the assembly to help generate more funds to carry out more development activities.
Mr Adam Wahab, an Environmental, Health and Sanitation Officer of the Tamale metropolis advised residents to stop the habit of open defecation and called for the need for everyone to build a toilet facility in the homes to stop open defecation .
CAE/GRB
