Hon Titus Kofi Beyuo
Lambussie

Mr Speaker, let me thank my Colleague, the MP for Nandom, for raising this important matter. It concerns Lambussie as much as it does Nandom.

On 27th April, we had a rainstorm like that. A second one occurred on 27th May and now, the roof of our only E-block is gone, and this has students in it. Currently, it is a precarious situation for us. The rainstorm he has just described, also swept through portions of my Constituency. In fact, my own home in the constituency has been without electricity since 13th June and other communities, like Kocha, Sentu, Gbingbala and Kukuwo, all in the Lambussie Constituency, have been without electricity because of the destruction of several electricity hightension and low-tension poles.

So, it is a dire situation. We want to call on the Ministry of Education to provide urgent assistance to these schools because school is in session. Also, we want the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo) and Volta River Authority (VRA) to try to restore electricity supply to the affected communities.

This predicament, Mr Speaker, brings to the fore the effect of climate change in these communities. Tree felling in our constituencies and global climate change is contributing to this, and I think that we must all rise up to this challenge and exhibit behaviours that would minimise such catastrophes. We call on all wellmeaning Ghanaians to assist us in this very difficult time.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

Hon Davis Ansah Opoku
Mpraeso

Mr Speaker, I sincerely empathise with my Colleague from Nandom.

Indeed, such disaster is something that we all do not hope for. If one is a Member of Parliament and the person is in Accra then the phone rings and the person is faced with this situation, the burden that it comes with is something that all of us would not want to carry. So, I can appreciate the concerns from our good Brother from Nandom and my good Friend, Prof Beyuo, from Lambussie. However, in all his brief statements, I did not sense the role of NADMO.

Mr Speaker, it appears to me that the NADMO that, in times past, we witnessed rushed to such scenes to provide relief items and to a larger extent, even support communities and solved problems for them, is no longer there. In the month of April, in Lambussie, schools have been ripped off and NADMO has done nothing about it. They are now writing to GETFund to try to catch the attention of the Minister for Education. It looks like NADMO is defunct now. If that is the case and they need help, they should come to this House so that we help them raise some funds, so that they are able to solve such problems. That should not be the burden of the MP.

If we were to talk to the MP in private, he would tell us that he is trying to raise money privately to solve the problems, when we have a state institution called NADMO, which is responsible for providing immediate relief for such occurrences. So, please, let us not politicise it. It is a reality that in the last five months, NADMO seems to have gone down and there is the need to do more to pump life into NADMO.

Mr Speaker, with these few words, I empathise with my Colleague and I pray that His Excellency John Mahama would, with the scarce resource that is available to him, instruct NADMO to quickly go to the aid of the Hon Member and support him. He needs help; so, this is not the time to politicise it. We are calling on NADMO to stop taking videos and pictures and putting them on TikTok and go to the aid of our Brother.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

Hon Nelson Kofi Djabab
Krachi East

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity granted me to contribute to the Statement made by my Friend, Hon Richard Kuuire, MP for Nandom.

Mr Speaker, he attributed issues of the recent rampant rainstorms to environmental degradation and I seem to agree with him. For this reason, we realise that the recent issues of rainstorm and its associated devastation on many communities in Ghana are becoming alarming.

Mr Speaker, it is against this background that I feel that relevant institutions like Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NADMO, and the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) should educate our people. This is because rampant environmental destruction such as indiscriminate bush fires, tree felling and indiscriminate land degradation, including associated environmental destruction are becoming so rampant. Therefore, our communities need some kind of education that these things lead to environmental depletion. The climate cover is becoming completely depleted.

A time will come when it will no more be the issue of Nandom alone that Ghanaians will look at, because at that time, it will be the whole Ghana and there may not be anybody to write this history about us. Therefore, the issues of environmental degradation must be taken seriously. It is against this background that I want to call on the various schools in our country—It is important and timely that the President has launched an initiative known as, “One Tree per Child” initiative. We want the schools to go back to the old days where school children were made to plant trees on their compounds. All these helped to check environmental degradation caused by the rainstorms that we are seeing now.

Some schools were completely devastated because there were no trees or no environment cover around their school compounds. It is against this background that we want to call on the stakeholders in education, especially the headmasters and teachers to take tree planting exercises seriously around their schools and to also educate our farmers to stop the indiscriminate degradation of the environment, so that our environment cover will be protected for the good of all Ghanaians.

Mr Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to the Statement of my Friend.