HELP CURB NEGATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICES — BUILSA DCE (PAGE 26, DEC 4)

The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Builsa in the Upper East Region, Mr Nobert Awulley, has charged chiefs and opinion leaders in the various communities to help in the campaign against negative environmental practices such as bush burning and indiscriminate tree felling as the dry season sets in.
He has warned that anybody who was caught would be severely dealt with to serve as a deterrent to others.
The DCE was speaking at a forum held at Sandema, the district capital, to round off a two-week public hearing session.
The programme was held in collaboration with a non-governmental organisation (NGO), Ibis West Africa, which took the district administrators round all the eight Town/Area Councils in the district to ascertain the immediate needs of the community members in order to prioritise them.
It also offered the people at the grass roots the opportunity to interact and brainstorm with policy makers on issues affecting them.
Addressing the forum, the DCE explained that the assembly had realised the need to engage the people, who were the end-users of facilities in the planning process.
He said the conventional practice whereby projects were often forced on the people in the communities did not augur well for even development, noting that when the people were not consulted before citing projects, they sometimes showed little interest in them.
Mr Awulley expressed the intention of the assembly to revive the various Town/Area Councils.
He said when this was done, the revenues they would mobilise would be used to carry out development projects.
He appealed to the people not to play politics with the public hearing session, since that might derail the good intentions of the programme.
The DCE charged chiefs and opinion leaders in the various communities to help in the campaign against unfriendly environmental practices.
Touching on the tarring of the Sandema-Chuchuliga road, Mr Awulley said there were some outstanding bills yet to be settled and that until the contract was legally abrogated the road could not be re-awarded to a different contractor in view of the legal implications involved.
He also said the Ministry of Roads and Highways was conducting investigations into how some contracts were awarded and that work would resume on the road as soon as investigations were completed.
A contributor to the programme, who described the shea tree as the cocoa of northern Ghana, lamented how some unscrupulous persons were destroying the economic crop with impunity.
He suggested the enactment of a legislation to protect the shea tree from further destruction as any further destruction of the tree could eventually lead to its extinction.
He said most families, survived economically on the shea-nuts during the lean season.
The Builsa District Planning Officer, Mr Lawrence Webadua, explained that the assembly had come to the end of the planning year, and for that matter, there was the need to interact with the end users of facilities to know their basic needs to enable the assembly to factor its findings into the district’s 2010-2013 medium-term development plans.
He commended the participants from the various communities for turning out in their numbers to brainstorm on issues of development concern despite the fact that they were in the peak of the harvesting season. Mr Webadua promised that their concerns would receive the needed attention.