31st Movement decries harassment

The 31st December Women’s Movement has said it is suffering harassment at the hands of the NPP government as part of the administration’s general campaign against the NDC.

This, according to the statement, is due to the erroneous belief in some quarters that the movement is part of the NDC.

In a statement issued in Accra yesterday and signed by its General Secretary, Mrs Cecilia Johnson, the movement made it clear that it is not a wing or an affiliate of the NDC.

"It is a legally registered non-governmental organisation whose members and project beneficiaries cut across all political parties, religious faiths and ethnicity," the statement noted.

It conceded that the president of the movement and some senior executive members are members of the NDC, but noted that the movement itself is not a political organisation.

"If it were, it could not have merited assistance for its projects from some major international organisations and foreign governments," the statement said.

The movement indicated that over the last nine months, no fewer than 12 separate government ministries and agencies have attempted to extort information, accounting records, operational documents, and correspondence from its members.

"In the process of interfering in the work of its members, a community centre built by the movement and other assets and vehicles of the movement have been seized, damaged or illegally confiscated," the movement said.

The statement mentioned some of the state agencies allegedly harassing the movement as the Office of the National Security Advisor, the Bureau of National Investigations, and the Serious Fraud Office, among others.

These agencies, the movement said, are engaged in a process to ostensibly seek information of interest to the government, but in reality aim at tying down the movement's workers, wasting their time, compelling the movement to spend scarce resources on photocopying documents and on mails and telecommunication, and frightening members into distancing themselves from the organisation.

The statement reiterated the position of the movement that it has no problem, in principle, "if the government wants to understand our operations and satisfy itself that what we are doing as an NGO is fully within the law and that we have done nothing unethical or illegal".

The statement, however, doubted if that is the intention of the government, since that would not have warranted the use of 12 state organisations and their field agents to undertake such an inquiry.

The statement said the trend of events shows that either the NPP government is out of control and its agencies are doing as they please or, worse still, the government has issued instructions to all the instruments of the executive to do everything to paralyse the movement.

The statement mentioned some of its funding agencies as the African Development Bank, the International Timber Organisation, the UN Fund for Population Activities, UNESCO, among others, which enabled the movement to be active in afforestation programmes nationwide, the building of community centres, the upgrading of health centres, among others.