Mayor of Tamale tours major streets ahead of decongestion exercise

The Mayor of Tamale has warned traders and hawkers on pavements and other unapproved places to relocate before a planned decongestion exercise on Monday May 15, 2017.

Mohammed Iddrisu Musah said no one would be spared if they fail to heed to the warning of the assembly.

Musah Superior, as he is popularly called, gave the warning during a tour of some major streets in the metropolis on Friday.

He was accompanied by the military, police, Fire Service personnel, the Metro Assembly Taskforce and representatives of traditional leaders.

Most parts of the Central Business District of Tamale, particularly the pedestrian walkways and the shoulders of the streets have been taken over by hawkers and vendors.

This has raised serious safety concerns for the hawkers and their activities have been an inconvenience to many pedestrians and other road users.

Consequently, the Metro Assembly in March this year, served notice to the hawkers to relocate as a first step to sanitizing the city to attract investors.

The assembly has subsequently and on various platforms, informed the hawkers and the general public of the intended exercise.

Friday’s tour by the Mayor was therefore to give a final warning to the traders to relocate before Monday.

A very spirited Musah Superior walked from vendor to vendor and from hawker to hawker and gave strict instructions to them to leave the pedestrian walk ways to avoid being affected by the exercise.

The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the assembly, Mr Musah Issah, in an interview with Radio Tamale, appealed to the hawkers to leave the streets before the exercise. He said hawkers who refused to relocate risked losing their goods.

“I want to use your medium again to appeal to all petty traders and hawkers who will be affected by this exercise to please begin to move back into the Central Market or look for alternative places before 15th May because we are not going to spare anybody,” he warned. “On that day if you refuse to move and we come over and meet you there, if you are selling groundnuts and another person is selling maize, oil, vegetables, we are going to pour all these things in our open truck.

Similar exercises in the past have yielded little results as the hawkers always returned months after the exercise. But the PRO said the assembly was determined, this time round, to ensure the exercise is sustainable.

He said police posts would be created at the decongested places to prevent the hawkers from returning.

“We are going to create pockets of police posts within the Central Business District. In other words wherever we evict them, we are going to position some police and members of our taskforce there,” he said.