THE VOLTA Lake Transport Company (VLTC) may soon withdraw its pontoon services on the Afram Lake between Adawso in the Kwahu South district and Ekye Amanfrom in the Afram Plains district of the Eastern Region. The company has been running at a loss since the district assembly enacted a law to ban charcoal burning and formed a task force including some army personnel to enforce the by-law on it.
A source at the VTLC head office at Akosombo told the Chronicle since the company is a limited liability company which operates for profit, it could be very difficult for it to run its services at a loss as is happening at Adawso-Ekye Amanfrom.
The source said there are so many routes that need pontoon services that if the trend continues the company will have no choice but to withdraw its pontoon, "Nana Kwasi Gyimah," at the Adawso-Ekye Amanfrom to a more profitable route. This means travelers on that portion of the lake would resort to the unsafe means of using canoes and small boats that had already claimed countless lives in crossing the lake.
When the station officer of the company at the Adawso station, Mr. Samuel Kwaku Bonney, was contacted he confirmed the ban on drivers using their trucks for carting charcoal from the Afram Plains affected the company's finances since it forms more than 40 per cent of its revenue. He informed the company's head office about the situation, and will soon meet to make a decision.
A resident farmer and a transport owner, Mr. Kwaku Osei, told this reporter that most truck drivers had withdrawn their vehicles on the Afram Plains route due to the constant harassment by the assembly's task force. He said the task force sometimes forces the drivers to offload yam and other foodstuffs they had taken over three days to load; to look for charcoal the task force claimed were hidden in the trucks. Osei stated that if the situation does not change, foodstuffs and other farm produce from the areas might pile up and go to waste since the farmers would not get vehicles to cart them to the market centres. At the moment, the harvesting of yam is in progress, but the drivers are refusing to go to the area.
Chronicle's visit to the affected communities such as Maame Krobo, Kwasi Kune, Kwasi Fante, Kwae Kese, Asanyansu Dagarti junction, German Akuraa, Nyame Bekyere, Dome and several other areas saw thousands of tonnes of bags of charcoal piled up due to the ban. The charcoal burners and traders who said they were in a difficult situation appealed to the authorities to give a human face to the whole exercise and allow them to cart the charcoal they had already burnt to the market centers. They claimed that constant rains in the area did not allow them to cart the charcoal from the bush, so they could not beat the end of September deadline set them by the Afram Plains district assembly.
When the Afram Plains district administration was contacted the district co-coordinating director, Mr. Thomas Ba-Innimayeh, stated that the assembly decided to ban charcoal burning in the district when the Abetifihene and the Adontenghene of Kwahu traditional area, Nana Asiedu Agyemang III (who has a vast land in the plains) complained about the devastating effect on the land and the environment when charcoal is burned. He told Chronicle that due to the problems the Eastern Regional Minister, Dr. Francis Osafo Mensah, and his Ashanti Region counterpart, Mr. Sampson Kwaku Boafo, who controls the Sekyere East district in the Ashanti Region, also ordered the discontinuation of charcoal burning at the end of November this year
