FIRE SERVICE FACES EVICTION (MIRROR, Saturday 12, 2009.PAGE 26)

From Benjamin Xornam Glover, Bolgatanga

The Upper East Regional Fire Service faces eviction owing to the non-payment of compensation to landowners for lands where the regional headquarters and municipal fire offices are sited.
The Regional Fire Officer, Assistant Chief Fire Officer Wynni Azomyann, has therefore appealed to the government to pay the compensation to forestall a recurrence of an incident in 2004, when a High Court in Bolgatanga ordered the seizure of an official car of the service to defray a debt, after the service failed to compensate landowners of the site where its junior staff quarters are located.
The High Court found the service guilty in 2004 and impounded the service’s vehicle with registration number, FS 141 for non-payment of judgement debt.
ACFO Azomyann said these at a durbar of security agencies during a working visit to the region by the Minister for the Interior, Mr Cletus Avoka, to assess the performance and the challenges that face the agencies under the ministry.
The Regional Fire Officer said presently, the service was occupying and using landed properties for which they had not completed any title deeds. As a result, the various landowners were claiming compensation for the use of their lands.
“Our continuous use and undisturbed occupancy is fraught with danger in this constitutional era,” he said.
The regional fire officer, therefore, appealed to the minister to help find a quick solution to this challenge in order to avert an impending embarrassment to the Ghana National Fire Service in particular and the government as a whole.
He appealed to Mr Avoka for funds to rehabilitate the residential facilities for fire personnel, which he said had not been renovated since their construction in 1974.
According to the Regional Fire Officer, the estimated cost and bill of quantities provided by the regional consultants of the Architectural and Engineering Services for the renovation of the four senior officers’ bungalows and 20 units of the junior staff quarters have been submitted to the appropriate quarters.
Mr Azomyann said about half of the fire engines in the region were not functioning and, therefore, appealed to the ministry to hasten the arrival of fire engines ordered from India and the USA.
Mr Avoka gave the assurance that the government was doing all it could to improve service conditions and promised that the region would have its fair share of the new fire engines to facilitate their work.
The Assistant Chief Fire Officer, Mr Kwesi Ankonam Quayson, said the focus of the new leadership of the service was to rebrand the service and make it more efficient.
Mr Quayson who is also a Director in charge of Research, Development and Monitoring at the National Headquarters of the service, challenged the personnel to commit themselves to the new vision of the current leadership of the service in order to achieve more successes.
Earlier, Mr Avoka visited the Fire Service installation at Navrongo, where the officer in charge, Mr Willie Anobiga, said work on a new 14-room office building had stalled since 1999 and appealed to the minister to ensure its early completion.