Wrongful and painful partition of Kpeve: Need for review of boundaries
By Tim Dzamboe
Kpeve is a town situated in the valley along the Eastern Corridor next to Peki on the main Accra–Hohoe highway in the Volta Region.
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It is a big and vibrant marketing centre which operates on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and thus attracted large patronage from all parts of the country, including the Republic of Togo.
Until 2004, its status was boosted because it was elevated as the capital of the newly created South Dayi District which was carved from the then Kpando district in the Volta Region.
Before the creation of the South Dayi District, half of Kpeve township had been situated in the Hohoe District/Municipality. It has now been carved into the new Afadzato –South District, which also was carved from the Hohoe municipality.
It was expected that with the creation and demarcation of new entities, this “Kpeve anomaly” would have been corrected to spare the people the several inconveniences and drudgery they encounter in their daily activities in respect of service delivery to the people. But this has not been done yet.
This situation could be likened to the saying that “a people eat at home and went to drink from a river”, because instead of accessing local government services a stone throw away at home, they were compelled to access it over 50 kilometres far away at Golokwati, the district capital of the Afadzato-South district.
This had affected decision making for the people of the South-Dayi District Assembly because when it came to voting, the people of Kpeve lacked the requisite numbers to win a case since all the assembly members of Kpeve Old Town had their votes in Afadzato-South District Assembly which of course had rendered the law, decree or bye law establishing the assembly obnoxious, ineffective and irrelevant.
This is because it is ridiculous for the ordinary man to realise that, although Kpeve remains undivided instead of being divided, the authorities had remained adamant about changing the location.
Is it a re-enactment of the historical and obnoxious, “Partition of Africa” by the colonialists that had dismembered the African continent and retarded its growth over centuries to date?
Last year, the people took to the streets with the view to bringing the incongruous arrangement to the attention of the government but there had been no response up till now.
Who is in charge, is it the Electoral Commission (EC), the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) or Parliament?
Isn’t it strange to build the accommodation for the district director of education at Kpeve Old Town, in the Afadzato-South District, which is in a different jurisdiction?
This is why all agencies responsible for demarcations of electoral areas and district assemblies must sit up to resolve the Kpeve situation and other peculiar ones found elsewhere in the country, because it is a source of waste and a hindrance to the decentralisation process.