Veep ends tour of Northern disaster regions

Vice President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur has expressed government’s determination to equip disaster institutions to rapidly deal with cases of emergency.

He said a substantial investment has been made over the years to position the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) as a reliable institution to deal with disasters across the country.

The vice president made these remarks when he embarked on an official tour of some flood prone areas in the Northern Region. The tour provided him the opportunity to carry out a firsthand assessment of the disasters and solidarise with the victims of the nine (9) districts, which suffered sustained waves of violent winds.

Mr. Amissah-Arthur toured Gushegu Senior High School where the severe storm visited its worst effect, destroying a number of classroom blocks and displacing about 2000 students.

He used the opportunity to assure the students and the school authorities that the government would do its best to ensure that structures were put in place as early as possible to prevent the interruption of the academic calendar.

He appealed to the students to nonetheless, take their studies seriously as the government makes plans to put the structures back to form.

During a brief stop at the Palace of the King of Mamprugu, the veep appealed to the people to avoid conflicts, saying that "Ghana needs peace for development... we cannot develop if there is constant conflict.”

According to the Vice President government could no longer continue to exhaust its scarce resources on conflicts that took lives of people and rendered so many people refugees in their own land.

He later visited the Gbewaa Palace which also had its fair share of the disaster caused by the windstorm. The Regent of Dagbon, Kampakuya-Naa, Yakubu Abdulai commended the government for sending relief items to the people and said their swift response was a manifestation that the Better Ghana agenda is on track.

The Vice President for his part urged the people to take government’s Greening Ghana programme seriously since that would lessen the effects of such disasters on the area.

NADMO said this month that its resources were so scarce it was difficult to help victims of the recent floods and appealed to companies and private individuals to help those affected.