Education has no substitute – Director

Mrs. Hamidu Fusata, the Wa West District Education Director on Thursday said education is the hob or fabric of societal growth and development.

She said education has no substitute in the scheme of things and so, investing in education should not be measured along other priorities.

Mrs Fusata speaking on “The importance of secular education in contemporary times” at the “Kaka” (Hippo) Festival of the Chiefs and people of the Wechiau Traditional Area of the Upper West Region.

She said education should be at the heart of all and efforts should be made to promote equal opportunity for all; pointing out that, all should endeavour to send their children, whether able or disable, to school at the right age of four years.

Mrs Fusata called on secularists to provide alternative secular curriculum to include non-secular education, which takes care of the spiritual part of man as part of the educational systems.

“There is the need to seriously blend secular and non–secular education in this contemporary world because non-secular education would help teach moralities and there would be less suffering in human the race”, she said.

She mentioned inadequate trained teachers, teacher absenteeism, commuting of teachers to school, inadequate school infrastructure, girl-child elopement, early marriages and problems of gender parity and equity, due to parental bias, as some of the challenges confronting secular education in the district.

Mrs Zenabu Wasai-King, Upper West Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the Hippo in the Black Volta River is a resource that needed to be protected and commended the people for creating a community reserve for them.

She said the Black Volta River serves not only the people of Wechiau, but the region and Ghana as a whole, and therefore any destructive activities, such as illegal mining, farming close to the river, bushfires, cutting down of trees and misuse of agrochemicals at any location along the river could have negative effects on livelihoods and habitat of the hippos.

Mrs. Wasai-King advised the people against the felling of trees for lumber and charcoal production without any conscious efforts to replace them.

The EPA Director said the EPA through the Ghana Environmental Management Project (GEMP) supported the people of Talawona with four wooden canoes for tourist to see the Hippos.

About 5,000 mahogany and cassia trees were also planted on a 2 kilometres stretch along the Black Volta River in 2014 to mark World Day of the combat against desertification and drought.

The EPA also provided cutlasses and wellington boots to the community to fight bushfires, and planted 1,000 cassia tree seedlings to replace those destroyed by bushfires.