Day: June 7, 2021

Putubiw (C/R),– Improper family planning is one of the known causes of child neglect in the Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese (AAK) District of the Central Region, Mrs Ellen Osei, the district’s Director of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), has said.

She said parents and guardians had abdicated their responsibilities because of the large family sizes and this was affecting societal growth and development.

“A little after 10 years, most parents and guardians leave their wards to their fate to manage and fend for themselves, this is our nation’s great tragedy because this could breed criminals which is a threat to national security,” she added.

Mrs Osei said this in an engagement with parents, teachers and students at the Putubiw and Apewosika communities in the AAK district on the need to take child nurturing and protection issues seriously.

She urged people to plan their family sizes to ensure proper care of their wards.

On education, the Director said parents must enable their children to attend basic education and to take advantage of the free second cycle education to help shape their future.

“Don’t leave your children to labour while his or her mates are in their classrooms studying and making their schooling a priority and let them know the benefits of being learned,“ she said.

She urged the youth to stay chaste until marriage and to use the internet carefully not to consume bad materials.

Mrs Osei urged them to know themselves and their limits, dress moderately and decently, show respect to all, eschew unhealthy competitions, accept corrections and be willing to change for the better.

To be able to carry on with the fight against teenage pregnancy, child neglect and child protection issues in the district, she urged corporate and private bodies to extend financial assistance to aid the good course.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Tamale,– Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, the Government Statistician and Chief Census Officer, says the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) is fully prepared to ensure the successful conduct of the 2021 Population and Housing Census.

In a speech read on his behalf in Tamale at the launch of the first digital district 30 days 2021 PHC Night, Professor Annim identified key areas for the exercise to include 131,739 localities, 51,916 enumeration areas, 11,020 supervisory areas in the 260 districts and 16 regions in the country.

He indicated that 75,000 tablets were made available for the enumerators to aid their operations and noted that there would be the use of interactive maps to facilitate effective deployment of field personnel to avoid duplications or gaps in the listing of structures and enumeration of persons.

He urged Ghanaians to have faith in the exercise and avail themselves to be counted in the third Population and Housing Census (PHC) data collection, scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2021.

Alhaji Shani Alhassan Saibu, Northern Regional Minister, said “information on population growth dynamics is important and highly needed by the government to plan for educational needs, where to locate health facilities, how to allocate the social expenditures and identify those who need help in the society”.

Mr Gilbert B. Nuuri-Teg, Tamale Metropolitan Coordinating Director, appealed to the public to cooperate fully with the staff of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) to make the exercise a success.

He said the PHC exercise would collect information on every structure, household and individual to provide reliable and disaggregated data to the lowest of administration and geography, including rural and urban differentiation.

Mr Nuuri-Teg said Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) would fully support the census exercise to address the various data gaps needed for effective planning of strictured programmes at the district level to promote development.

The PHC exercise is to achieve complete coverage of all structures and persons in Ghana, which is in line with the “leave no one behind” agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

It would provide updated demographic, socio-economic and housing data to support development and decision-making as well as the tracking of global, regional, and national development goals.

Source: Ghana News Agency

The Appointments Committee of Parliament will continue vetting Deputy Ministerial nominees later today, Monday, June 7, 2021.

The committee will vet four nominees as the exercise enters the second week.

The session will begin with a Deputy Minister for Energy, Andrew Egyapa Mercer, Deputy Minister-Designate for Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, Deputy Minister-designate for Lands and Natural Resources, George Mireku Duker, and Deputy Minister-designate for Health, Tina Mensah.

The exercise is expected to end on the 15th of June.

The Committee has since last week vetted about ten of the 40 nominees.

President Akufo-Addo submitted the list of nominees to the Speaker of Parliament on April 21, 2021.

Ten of the nominees are women.

The list also featured first-time Members of Parliament like Hassan Tampuli and John Ampontuah Kumah.

A number of Ministers also maintained their portfolios from President Akufo-Addo’s first term, including Abena Osei-Asare at the Finance Ministry, Mohammed Amin Adam, William Owuraku Aidoo at the Energy Ministry, Osei Bonsu Amoah at the Local Government, Decentralisation & Rural Development, and Tina Mensah at the Health Ministry, among others.

In addition, a former deputy Minister of Finance, Charles Adu-Boahen, was also nominated as the Minister of State at the Ministry of Finance and has been vetted accordingly.

Source: Modern Ghana

Ayigya,- The General Overseer of Calvary Charismatic Center (CCC), Reverend Ransford Obeng, has appealed to Christians to participate and be counted in the upcoming census.

The CCC said the right data on the country’s population was critical to the socio-economic development of the country.

Addressing the media during a blood donation exercise at the church’s headquarters at Ayigya, Rev Obeng noted that the census provided the Ghana Statistical Service with the opportunity to get the actual information of persons living in the country into its database.

This information, he said, was necessary for development planning.

“It is important that as Christians we do all we can to support a worthy cause such as the upcoming census which would be used for development purposes,” he said.

Reverend Obeng, who turned 65 over the weekend, used the occasion to donate blood to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) Medicine and Transfusion Unit.

Members of the church, who gathered to celebrate the servant of God, also donated pints of blood to the KATH team.

The CCC leader has for the past five years dedicated his birthdays to organising blood donation exercises as his contribution to addressing the perennial lack of blood in health facilities.

Rev Obeng urged the public to use the influences and opportunities they have to better the lives of others.

“When God blesses you kindly use the influence you wield to do good to people, especially the needy and the sick,” the CCC leader intimated.

Dr Shirley Phyllis Owusu-Ofori, Head of KATH Transfusion Medicine Unit, said she was happy with the contribution of CCC to restocking the blood bank.

She noted that CCC has for the past 5 years contributed 383 pints of blood to the unit.

Every pint of blood, she revealed has the potential of saving the lives of three people.

Dr Owusu-Ofori urged private and individual organisations as well as churches to emulate the example of Rev Obeng and CCC by donating blood as well as organising outreaches at regular intervals to restock the blood bank.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Accra,- Mr Joseph Cudjoe, the Minister of Public Enterprises, on Monday paid a working visit to the State Interest and Governance Authority (SIGA) and urged it to help in safeguarding investments in state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

He said a lot of state resources had been invested in specified entities like the SOEs, joint venture companies, and regulatory firms, but those investments had not yielded the expected results in terms of performance, output and outlet.

SIGA is tasked to promote, within the framework of government policy, the efficient and profitable operations of statutory corporations engaged in trade.

Mr Cudjoe expressed regret at the loss of investment in the Black Star Line, which owned 25 ships at the Tema Harbour some time ago, the Ghana Airways and other state investments in telecommunication, among others, which were mismanaged leading to their collapse.

“All I’m saying is when we look at every sector where the state had poured investment in, if the outcomes have been what we expected as we made the investment, today, Ghana would be doing very well,” he said.

“But that is a problem the President wants to solve. We want to look at 175 specified entities, comprising 52 State Owned Enterprises, 46 joint venture companies and 77 other state equities, as portfolio of investment and make sure that those that must be partnered with strategic investors are done, and those to be funded through the stock exchange are also taken care of.”

As part of the tool for solving those problems, he said government had created SIGA to be responsible for its shares and administer it to generate the maximum benefits.

He said President Akufo-Addo’s vision of the One District One Factory programme, which had provided 76 private sector-led companies, with more in the offing, was to create wealth for the country “by way of making sure that those that must be partnered with strategic investors are done.”

Mr Stephen Asamoah Boateng, the Director General of SIGA, agreed with the Minister that more had to be done by the Authority, whose mandate was to ensure good corporate governance and help manage SOEs more profitably.

He said SIGA was poised to work with its partners, the Banks, the Public Services Commission, and the Regulatory institutions to manage the SOEs into more profitable entities.

He emphasized the importance of creating wealth in the Ghanaian community, and said that was what SIGA was poised to do, to make its work relevant to the ordinary person.

The Authority was working with the Stock Exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Insurance Commission to list many state-owned enterprises onto the stock exchange to make it easier for the ordinary Ghanaian to buy and earn some of the dividends.

SIGA was created to replace the merged Divestiture Implementation Committee and the State Enterprises Commission in 2019, while the Public Enterprises Ministry was created this year by President Akufo-Addo.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Wa, (UW/R),- Mr Emmanuel Lignule, the Upper West Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has called on community leaders to enact bylaws against the harvesting of trees, especially economic trees to save the environment.

He said economic trees such as shea and Dawa Dawa were the hard-hit species being harvested in the region for commercial charcoal production, but that there was currently no law against felling such trees in the off reserve.

Mr Lignule, who made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Wa on the occasion of the World Environment Day (WED), said the existing law only prohibited the cutting of cocoa trees and trees in forest reserves.

The United Nations set aside 5th June every year to be observed as WED to create awareness and to encourage the people to take action to protect the environment.

This year’s commemoration was on the theme: “Ecosystem Restoration”, concerning the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which highlights the significance of restoring the ecosystem.

“Demand for charcoal is one of the issues that drive the increasing cutting of shea trees. We cannot stop tree cutting, what we can do is to control it, and the difficulty in controlling tree cutting is that there are areas where the law prohibits tree cutting.

“If you look at the legal regime, the law says that you cannot cut trees in the forest reserve, but in off-reserve areas, tree cutting is allowed, so that makes it difficult to prevent people from tree cutting,” he explained.

Stressing on the devastating impact of illicit logging of trees, Mr Lignule indicated that the EPA was engaging communities and traditional authorities on felling of economic trees and encouraging them to enact bye-laws to regulate tree harvesting at the community level.

He, however, observed that in some areas where there were laws against the felling of economic trees, those laws were not effective partly owing to the lack of strong leadership structures in those communities.

He said the EPA was, therefore, assisting communities to enact workable bye-laws as well as strengthening the local level leadership structure to enable them to effectively implement them.

The structures that support the enforcement of the rules, if they are strong enough, even without gazetting the rules could be enforced”, he said.

Mr Lignule indicated that they were educating the people on the importance of protecting the environment, and how they could harvest trees sustainably.

He said they were also sensitising the communities to desist from felling trees in environmentally sensitive areas such as water bodies, particularly dams, as that would cause the water bodies to easily dry up.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Tarkwa (W/R),- Madam Lydia Ama Toku, the Tarkwa branch Manager of Priority Insurance Company Limited, has urged drivers to take personal insurance policies to assist them in difficult times.

She said the Government had made third party insurance policy compulsory because of the safety of passengers and property when accidents occurred.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), Madam Toku said with Priority Insurance Company Limited accident victims did not go through challenges before their compensation were paid.

She encouraged drivers to take their motor vehicle insurance policy seriously.

“We offer a comprehensive portfolio of innovative and customer-oriented insurance products designed to deliver effective covers for various needs of individuals, households, enterprises, businesses and corporate entities,” she said.

Madam Toku said their products covered many types of risks such as death, bodily injury, loss or damage to property, loss of earning, legal liabilities, burglary, engineering and construction risks.

“Life is full of uncertainties and we want to be on the side of those that go through unfortunate events such as accident with its resultant negative consequences,” she said.

Source: Ghana News Agency