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N JUABEN N: Assembly holds ‘Meet the Press’ session

The directive from the Ministry of Information for all MMDCES across the country to organize a meet the press series has been acknowledged and duly fulfilled by the New Juaben North Municipal Assembly.

Date Created : 10/31/2019 6:37:26 AM : Story Author : Elizabeth Ansaah/Ghanadistricts.com

The Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) of New Juaben North Municipal Assembly (NJNMA) met the press on Friday the 25th of October, 2019 at the Municipal Chief Executive’s office.

The aim of meet the press conference with the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) of the New Juaben North Municipal Assembly, Comfort Asante was to account for what the Assembly has done since it was formed 13 months ago under Legislative Instrument (LI) 2302 with emphasis on flagship programmes of government and provision of an account of developmental projects undertaken within the Municipality.

The MCE welcomed all the media personnel present to the function and gave a brief history of the New Juaben North Municipal Assembly.

Madam Asante in her address stated the New Juaben North was not receiving much development relative to what goes on at the New Juaben South. She said more than 70% of the total resources, were used to develop the South to the detriment of the North. In summary the North of the Municipality was completely neglected she added.

The MCE said the Assembly was put in place to turn things around in the North and gradually it is fulfilling the mandate given, by providing facilities that are lacking or inadequate in the Assembly.

The first item of the presentation was government flagship programmes undertaken by the Assembly. Honorable Comfort Asante was proud to announce that the Assembly had six Senior High Schools (Oyoko Methodist Senior High School, Pope Johns Senior High School, Pentecost Senior High School, Koforidua Technical School, Ghana Senior High School, and SDA Senior High School) benefiting from the Free Senior School policy of the government. She reiterated government’s reason to ensure every child to continue second cycle education and there should not be any reason why a Ghanaian child should miss the second cycle education that is why the Free Senior High School policy was implemented.

She said for the six senior high schools in the Municipality, four are running the green and gold (double track) system. These schools are Oyoko Methodist Senior High, Pope Johns Senior High School, Ghana Senior High School, and SDA Senior High School with over seven thousand (7,000) students benefiting from this initiative of the government.

The MCE was also happy to announce that most of the day students of the various senior high schools are indigenes of the Municipality and hoped in the nearest future, the Assembly will be having competent and holistic people who will be running the Municipality, region, and country at large.

The Assembly is supporting this laudable project by the government by providing buses at a subsidized rate to enable day students to get to school and home well and safe, provision of desks to the second cycle schools and supporting them with building materials to increase facilities in the schools.

Madam Comfort Asante stated the school feeding programme is still in place and 28 schools in the Municipality are benefiting from the school feeding programme.

Another flagship programme of the government the MCE spoke about was the Planting for Export and Rural Development (PERD). The main purpose of the PERD programme is to ensure that other economic crops are also produced in the country apart from our traditional crops.

Six new economic crops like cashew, coconut, oil palm, and citrus are part of the economic crops introduced into the system. The New Juaben North Municipal Assembly as part of this government flagship programme opted for oil palm plantation in the Municipality. The assembly met with farmers in the Municipality and they agreed to add the oil palm to the traditional crop of cocoa.

The Assembly targeted providing 100,000 nursed seedlings to supply to farmers. Initially, 60,000 viable oil seedlings were nursed at a nursery in Asokore and those 60,000 seedlings have matured to a stage where they can be transplanted. About two months ago, 84 farmers were educated on how transplanting of the seedlings should be done.

The MCE, Madam Comfort Asante also talked about the upcoming referendum on December 17, 2019. She commended the president of the country His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa for his bravery to allow the people vote to amend the constitution (Article 55 clause 3) and if the percentage needed to amend is attained, MMDCES will no longer be appointed by the president but voted for by the people. “Only a few heads of state would want to give such a powerful mandate backed by constitution” she said. She hoped that the people vote yes to the referendum to elect rather than appoint MMDCES and urged all the media personnel present to helped spread the message to the general public so the referendum becomes a success.

As part of the presentation, The MCE highlighted ongoing, completed infrastructural projects, state of sanitation, and other initiatives by the Assembly such as Street Naming and Property Address system amongst others within the Assembly were presented with pictorial evidence to the press present at the conference.