Chereponi DCE denies media report

Isaac Yeboah Politics Jul - 20 - 2013 , 12:00

The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Chereponi, Alhaji Mohammed Seidu Issah Abah, has denied media reports that sought to describe the district as a deprived area where people live in abject poverty.

At a news conference in Chereponi, which was also attended by heads of department in the district and some assembly members, Alhaji Seidu said such publications had the tendency to cast a slur on the image of the district and to also turn prospective civil servants away from accepting postings to the area.

Citing a popular weekly newspaper (The Spectator), he said an article titled “When humans and pigs compete for food” appeared on page five of the Saturday, June 22 edition of the paper in which a photograph was shown with human beings mingling with pigs.

He said the author of the article concluded that the humans were competing with the pigs for food. “I presume the intention of the author was to make his article attractive and interesting but we of the district take great exception to it for the picture is considered dehumanising and tend to denigrate the dignity of the persons captured,” he stated.

He said the second paragraph in the article which stated that “this is the stark reality that confronts any visitor to Chereponi in the Northern Region” was vexatious, puerile and highly iconoclastic as it did not reflect the realities on the ground.

“I had taken the pain to visit the family involved and the information I gathered was that, the woman in the picture had returned from picking sheanuts and was spreading the nuts for sunshine and this attracted the children and even the pigs because it was close to the landlord’s piggery,” he explained.

“This mere coincidence should not have been interpreted as if it was the usual thing that pertains in Chereponi where humans dine with pigs because of poverty,” he added.

Also citing the Member of Parliament (MP) for the area, the DCE said, “I read with sadness another publication attributed to Hon. Azuma Namoro, the MP for Chereponi, published on Myjoyonline.com as captured from Asempa and Adom Fms on the programme ‘Burning Issues’.

He said the MP was alleged to have said in that article that 24 women died through labour every year in his constituency due to bad roads.

“He was also alleged to have said that women in labour are usually carried on bicycles and wheel barrows on a journey of 80 km to the nearest clinic where a medical doctor is rarely available as the district has only one clinic manned by just three nurses without a mid-wife or a doctor,” he added.

Debunking the claims, the DCE said the district had one hospital and not a clinic at Chereponi, eight CHIPS Compounds, one health care centre and a child reproductive and health centre.

He said the hospital has a resident doctor, two medical assistants, an anaesthetist, 73 nurses, three midwives, four pharmacists and two lab technicians.

He said although some residents in the district, might send their women in labour to health facilities on bicycles, “none of such women is transported to a health centre in a wheel barrow”.

He wondered why the MP, who had had the opportunity to govern the district for seven years as DCE, would be making such remarks, adding, “I thought he would have been telling us the effort he put in to rectify these situations that he is loudly talking about today.”

The DCE said he was, however, mollified by the fact that the intention of the MP might not have been to denigrate the district but to call for more attention to the area “but I think it is a bit late because he could have done this under the President Kufuor administration where he served as DCE for Saboba/Chereponi for nearly seven years”.

He said the press conference was, therefore, to set the records straight and not to attack the MP or the journalist who wrote the story in the weekly newspaper.