Women urged to take interest in politics

Apam (C/R), Jan 28, GNA - Miss Joyce Aidoo, Gomoa District Chief Executive (DCE), has called on women in Ghana to let election of Mrs Emma Johnson Sirleaf and Angela Merkel as heads of State and Government for Liberia and Germany respectively encourage them to take to politics. Miss Aidoo said the myth surrounding politics as a preserve for men had been broken long ago and urged women to offer themselves for the District level elections which would be held this year. "Use the District level elections as a spring board to higher levels in politics," the DCE said when addressing the Third Ordinary

Meeting of the Fourth Session of Gomoa District Assembly at Apam. Miss Aidoo urged members of the Assembly to use the remaining period to end their term of office to "finish hard" to enable the electorate to return them to the Assembly. The DCE expressed concern about the poor performance of the Assembly in revenue mobilisation. According to her, only 215,028,722 cedis was collected out of the estimated revenue of 823,323,000 cedis for last year, representing a mere 26 percent coverage. She appealed to members of the Assembly to discuss the problem dispassionately and come out with practical solutions. Miss Aidoo was unhappy about inability of the District to make the District Mutual Health Insurance to take off. She said the District had registered only 5,000 people and was among the three Districts in the Region yet to make the contributors to start accessing free health care.

The DCE appealed to the Scheme manager and his team to put in more efforts to make the Scheme to take off by the end of February. She also appealed to members of the Assembly to help in the registration exercise. Miss Aidoo was not happy about lateness of some teachers to school as revealed by her unannounced visits to some schools and urged School management Committees not to take their work for granted. "While we motivate hard working teachers, we should also sanction those who are not taking their work seriously," she said. Mr Fred Oscar Abban, Presiding Member, expressed concern about a negative report on Gomoa District at the last 57th Annual New Year School held at Legon, on chieftaincy and land litigations in the District and appealed to well-meaning citizens to help to address the issue. Mr Abban appealed to the government to expedite action on creating a new District out of the Gomoa District to make administration easy.