|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
MONTECRISTO
The Middle Belt and Savannah has, in the last couple of decades, been stricken by bouts of erratic rainfall.
The phenomenon has culminated in poor harvests and food loss in vegetables and staples, including yam and tomato.
Economic loss in the process culminated in dwindling livelihoods and socio-economic distress. Up and up into the Upper East, it has been the same situation, except for the intervention from irrigation facilities, including Tono, Vea and Pwalugu.
That is why politicians in the northern regions ought to be worried when reports about ought devastating rainstorms hit communities as it did recently when a string of storms wreaked havoc across several communities in the Kpandai District.
Details
According to the reports, one person was reported dead, with numerous others injured, and hundreds displaced, taking shelter in public amenities such as schools and churches.
The disaster, which struck on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, is the second of its kind in less than three weeks, intensifying concerns over the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, including rainstorms and heatwaves in an already humid environment.
Again, as reports indicated, the worst-affected areas include Wiae, Labrido, Kabonwule, and Buya, where homes, schools, health centres, and places of worship have been severely damaged.
The report adds that victims of the storm are currently seeking refuge with friends and relatives, while others have relocated to neighbouring communities, exacerbating overcrowding and discomfort.
Extensive damage
Speaking to Graphic Online, Assemblyman for the Wiae Electoral Area, Mpoasan Bayido Robert, described the scale of destruction as immense. He detailed the extensive damage, citing the collapse of the Wiae CHPS Compound nurse’s quarters, ANC pavilion, Wiae D/A Kindergarten school block, Wiae Pentecost Church, and Labrido Chapel, which also serves as a classroom. Additionally, the Buya D/A Primary School has sustained significant structural damage.
“In Wiae alone, 104 houses have been destroyed, alongside several institutional facilities. Labrido has also lost 19 structures,” Mr Bayido Robert confirmed.
He has since issued an urgent appeal for support from the government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and benevolent individuals to assist in rebuilding efforts.
“There is an urgent need to restore the affected schools so that pupils can continue their education. With their classrooms destroyed, learning has been disrupted, putting the children’s academic progress at risk,” he lamented.
Residents have called for immediate intervention to provide relief and mitigate further hardships.
As displaced families struggle to find shelter and essential resources, local authorities and humanitarian agencies are being urged to respond swiftly to the crisis.
Afforestation
Interestingly, instead of areas such as the Savannah and Northern Regions obligating themselves to an abiding culture of engaging in afforestation programmes, firewood trade is becoming a vibrant one, despite caution particularly by the Provisional National Defence Council PNDC and National Democratic Congress NDC administration for residents in rural communities to stop felling trees to burn charcoal as a livelihood to feed markets in the South of Ghana.
Tree planting as a healthy national exercise has recently been reduced to political gimmicks and exercises in party colours, without a national programme to monitor and sustain voluntary tree planting programmes for its economic and ecological value in places such as the North and Savannah where erratic rainfall has been a source of worry to producers and other economic actors.
But programme tree planting is also becoming a rarity in the lush Eastern and Ashanti Regions where galamsey is rife and forests and arable are being displaced with impunity by goons, immigrants and misled delinquents living in and outside the communities. This phenomenon persists, while state officials, including sons and daughters from the Savannah and Northern Regions, look on, unable to use their leverage as opinion leaders to engage leaders of traditional communities and economic actors to stop the illegality.
Making gas available
When the PNDC and the early NDC administrations advocated for liquefied petroleum gas as an alternative to firewood and charcoal, the expectations were that gas would be available all across the country and be made affordable to rural communities.
Unfortunately, the programme couldn’t be sustained, compelling rural communities, particularly those in the Savannah and Northern parts of the country to return to old ways of utilising energy for domestic purposes such as cooking and indigenous catering.
Recently, however, the situation has improved with the two leading political administrations having invested in that sector. But that has not encouraged most rural residents to move out into shrubs and woodlots to fetch firewood to fuel domestic activity as an alternative to gas particularly in the ecologically embattled communities where tree planting and charcoal production cannot be said to be complementing each other in supporting the ecology to withstand climate change and its economic fallout on.
Way forward
Meteorologists worldwide have predicted extreme weather conditions for the entire global community with Ghana billed to face flooding and the transition belts as usual experiencing erratic rainfall.
Unless we and, particularly the Savannah and Northern Regions respond collectively to the urgent need to fight climate change through afforestation, food security is likely to be threatened, despite any ambitious programmes government puts out across the country and, particularly, the transition belt into the North.
It will be in the interest of the nation and particularly communities in the transition belt, if the respective assemblies and municipal as well as metropolitan authorities unite in designing an abiding tree planting programme to save the ecology and their livelihoods as government does its bit in supporting agriculture and in attaining food security targets.
Managing the situation is important. That is why we have farmer unions, opinion leaders led by traditional rulers. More importantly, that is why we have the politician paid from the public purse to lead inn securing communities and livelihoods.
And the North must show it is capable of managing situations when they take up appointments as public sector chiefs, local government chief executives and particularly Regional Ministers.
When the state pays such elevated citizens fat salaries, it is so that they perform as trained, competent and capable citizens, and not noisy chieftains in smock and fugu.
