DCE advocates for feeder road offices in districts

Dennis Armah-Frempong, the District Chief Executive (DCE) for Agona East has advocated the setting-up of District Feeder Road Offices to help upgrade roads and facilitate transportation of foodstuffs and goods.

He said the abolition of Feeder Roads Department that were integral parts of the various districts had created a vacuum for reshaping of deteriorated roads in the rural areas.

The DCE made the suggestion, when he inspected reshaping of eight feeder roads being rehabilitated at Agona Breprow and seven other villages in the Agona East of the Central Region.

He said farmers were having hectic times transporting their produce to market centres due to bad roads in the hinterlands, while lack of coordination also made it difficult for District Assemblies to know which feeder roads were awarded on contract by the Regional Offices of Department of Feeder Roads.

He stated that establishing the District offices would save the District Assemblies some funds and ensure value for money as some contractors received award letters only to realise that the Assemblies had already reshaped the roads.

Mr Armah-Frempong said the situation compelled majority of the Assemblies to spend huge sums of money from the Common fund to rehabilitate feeder roads.

According to him the Agona East District Assembly had within two years, four months reshaped 15 feeder roads, while eight new ones were pending approval to be reshaped from the common fund.

He said seven of the feeder roads being reshaped included; Duotu/Breprow, Breprow/Kwame Asare, Duabone. Kwamekwaa, Kenyankor Fahiaya , Kwame Ntsiful and Duotu Nkrankwaa.

He said the Assembly would continue to reshape all feeder roads in the district and urged the chiefs and people of the area to exercise restraints as government would not ignore their requests.

Mr. Armah-Frempong announced that 25 communities in the Agona East would be connected to the national electricity grid before by 2020 to promote agro-processing and rural industry.

He said the engineers from the |Ministry of Energy had mapped out all beneficial communities and contractors would soon move to the various sites to begin work.

Mr Kofi Abban, Unit Committee Chairman of Agona Breprow expressed appreciation to the Assembly for the rehabilitation of the roads saying it would help cocoa and food crop farmers in the area and appealed to the government to speed up rural electrification projects to facilitate the processing of their palm oil and large cassava plantations.