Holidays must promote tourism - Deputy Minister

Mr Patrick Yaw Boamah, Deputy Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources has called for a dispassionate debate on how to use public holidays to promote local tourism in Ghana.

According to him, public discussions on the matter would help shape government’s policy and help people to derive the needed benefit from public holidays.

Mr Boamah, who made the call in an interview with the media in Parliament sought to campaign for the use of public holidays to drive home-grown tourism.

He said apart from Christmas Days, New Year Days, Edil Fitr and other religious public holidays, the rest such as May Day among others could be programmed to provide the required benefit to the citizens.

He called on the Ministry of Interior to structure the country’s public holidays to make it effective and useful to the people.

“Sometimes it distorts a lot of things…You have a holiday on Wednesday, you go back on Thursday, productivity levels, the energies and the way people take advantage and not reporting back to work, we must be realistic,” he said.

He said the issue of how to make the public holidays useful must engage all the citizens.

Mr Boamah also explained that in some foreign jurisdictions, holidays that fell on Monday or in the middle of the week were pushed to Friday to enable citizens’ plan for a long weekend.

He said due to the long weekends people were able to travel up-country, visit families and tourist sites.

He said the citizens who travelled up-country and visited tourist sites were able to contribute to the development of the local economy as a result of their expenditure at those places.

Parliament in March, 2019 passed the Holiday (Amendment) Bill.

The Holiday (Amendment) Bill, 2018, was to amend the Public Holidays Act, 2001 (Act 601), to provide for the 7th day of January, the 4th day of August and the 21st day of September as additional statutory public holidays and for the celebration of the 25th day of May and the 1st day of July as commemorative days.

The existing Founder’s Day holiday, which is observed on the 21st day of September, will now be observed as a Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day and would continue to be a public holiday.

The 4th of August would also be observed as a public holiday in recognition and appreciation of the role the forebears who played roles towards the founding of independent Ghana.

The 7th of January would likewise be observed as a public holiday in remembrance of the coming into force of the 1992 Constitution, which birthed the Fourth Republic, the longest in Ghana’s history.