Statistical Service Investigates Use of National Documents To Wrap Smoked Fish

The Ghana Statistical Service is investigating reports that a group of market women at the Makola Market in Accra are using birth registration documents to wrap smoked fish. Officials of the service are also trying to unravel how the documents got into the hands of the women and to recover whatever might be left of them.

The market women were seen using the documents to wrap their merchandise last Saturday. The team from the Statistical Service went to the Makola Market on Wednesday, afternoon in search of the women, who unknowingly, were using the form A’s to ply their trade.

The team was only sent out after Joy FM’s enquiries about the forms and how they were being used or misused. Flanked by about three other officials, the officer responsible for the custody of the form, Edith Ameka, said the forms were supposed to have been kept in a room where access is restricted to a few senior officials of the service.

Earlier at the Births and Deaths Registry, the Chief Registration Officer, Kwakuvi Zagbedeh, said the form A’s, are periodically sent to the Government Statistician for safekeeping.

He said all such forms A’s from independence to 1993 are with the government statistician. This implies that the forms, which the market women were using to wrap their fish, could only have come from the Statistical service as they bore the date 1989.

According to Mr Zagbedeh, a similar situation occurred in 1995 when large quantities of the forms were recovered from a doughnut seller. He said the information on the form A is usually kept in a central register and the documents discarded either through burning or recycling.

Whatever the case might be the nation has to wait awhile to know whether an officer deliberately stole the documents and sold them to the market women.