Former President J. A. Kufuor with some officials at Tommy Amematekpor’s funeral
The funeral of Tommy Amematekpor, one of the biggest names in the New Patriotic Party (NPP), as far as the Volta region was concerned, recorded a sorry spectacle over the weekend, as senior party members, failed to attend and accord him the expected burial that the NPP is known for.
Many of the known faces, including President Akufo-Addo, National Chairman, Freddie Blay, General Secretary, John Buadu, National Organizer, Sammi Awuku and National Youth Organiser, Henry Nana Boakye, were not present at the funeral of Tommy Amematekpor, who was a Presidential Staffer in the Kufuor government from 2001.
Millennials in Ghana are working hard to ‘make farming sexy’
After he graduated from university, Vozbeth Kofi Azumah was reluctant to tell anyone – even his mother – what he planned to do for a living.
“I’m a farmer,” he says, buzzing his motorcycle between freshly ploughed fields in Agotime Beh, Ghana. “Here, that’s an embarrassment.”
In some parts of the world, farmers are viewed with respect and cultivating the land is seen as an honourable trade. But in a region where most agriculture is still for subsistence – relying on cutlass, hoe and hope for rain – farming is a synonym for poverty.
But Azumah is among a growing number of young, college-educated Africans fighting the stigma by seeking to professionalise farming. They are applying scientific approaches and data-crunching apps not just to increase yields, but to show that agriculture can be profitable.
They call themselves “agripreneurs”.
It’s a steep challenge. Undeveloped distribution networks, poor roads and fickle water supplies are difficult hurdles for even the most competent farmer, and many of these would-be farmers have little training or experience.
Both are a rare delicacy here and typically harvested from the wild. Azumah, who has a bachelor’s degree in social science, spotted a missed opportunity: captive breeding. When he told his mother, Martha Amuzu, she wept.
“Oh, I cried,” she says, sitting in the family farmhouse in the Volta region, about four hours from Accra, the capital. “My expectation for him was to advance his education, to work in an office wearing suit and tie.”
Outside her doorstep, her son has transformed what was once a small subsistence plot into “West African Snail Masters,” his snail hatchery.
He has just begun with 500 fist-size land snails plucked from the forest floor in Ghana in the rainy season when they are plentiful. On a recent afternoon, Azumah wandered between the newly built pens, testing soil moisture and alkalinity. In another outbuilding, he fed leaves to pens of the giant rats, also known as grasscutters.
When his mother saw his modern methods, she was won over. “Others are working in white-collar jobs and they hardly get paid,” she says.
Azumah now produces online workshops to get others interested in raising snails. “I see a university degree as, you have learned to think outside the box, to come up with solutions” to problems like poverty and food insecurity, he says.
Though about 60 per cent of Africa’s population is younger than 24, the average farmer’s age is 60, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Without intervention, experts say, Africa runs the risk of having no one to replace its farmers as they die.
At the same time, low use of fertiliser, and reliance on things like rain-fed irrigation, has left Africa with crop yields that are only 20 to 30 per cent of what could be produced, research has found. While there are large, successful farms on the continent, most farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are smallholders, cultivating an acre or less. Many farmers are hardly able to feed their families, much less engage in business ventures.
Since President Nana Akufo-Addo took office in 2017, Ghana has made raising the productivity of its agricultural sector a key initiative.
Augustine Collins Ntim, the deputy minister for local government and rural development, says he was struck to find on his travels to the United States and Europe that some farmers were well-to-do.
“You come back home in Ghana, our farmers are living in abject poverty,” he says. “The gap is political commitment and leadership.”
Over 2,700 agricultural officers, each issued a motorbike by the government, have been deployed across the country to educate farmers on best practices, such as which crops are most adapted to climate change. Even with government support, farming still carries such a stigma that teachers chide students that if they don’t study hard, they’ll end up growing cassava.
But celebrities have answered the call: a pop song features singers riding tractors and exhorting children to start farming, and there are several farming reality television shows.
“We have to show people farming is bling,” says Emmanuella Pi-Bansah, a graduate student in charge of shelling escargot at West African Snail Masters.
Menstruating girls 'banned from crossing Ghanaian river to get to school'
'Sometimes I think that we need to ask for some form of accountability from these gods who continue to bar a lot of things from happening'
Five people killed in Canary Island cruise ship accident after lifeboat falls into the sea.
Five crew members have been killed, and a further three injured after a lifeboat fell into the sea from a cruise ship tied up at the port of Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands.
The accident happened on the Majesty, operated by UK-based Thomson Cruises, during a routine safety drill.
The island's Emergency and Security Coordination Center said rescue personnel were called to the dockside at 1205 GMT (7:05 a.m. EST) today after "a lifeboat with occupants had fallen overboard from a cruise ship docked at the pier of Santa Cruz port in La Palma."
The lifeboat fell into the sea trapping its occupants.
Those killed include three Indonesians, a Filipino and a Ghanaian. Three further people were injured in the incident after the boat fell over 20m into the sea.
Capitals of the newly created regions in Ghana
The creation of the proposed new regions in Ghana largely rest on the affected communities who submitted petitions and made demands to the Presidency for it.
The Constitution stipulates that, once the President receives a petition for the creation of a region, he must forward it to the Council of State for advice.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo set up a Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice S.A. Brobbey, to collate views and to make recommendations for carving out the new regions following petitions, he received from individuals across the country.
The Commission after nationwide consultations with the major stakeholders' recommended the establishment of the six regions in its report to the President.
Father arrested for forcefully having sex with daughter and impregnating her.
The police have arrested a 42-year-old man for allegedly impregnating his 14-year-old biological daughter at Anyah in the Greater Accra Region.
The suspect, according to reports, had been repeatedly having sex with her daughter and impregnating the girl in the process.
It was revealed that the father started having sexual intercourse with the girl after the wife of the suspect travelled to Dawurapong, in the Central Region with their four other children to seek herbal treatment for one of the children who were sick.
According to the Public Relations Officer of the Accra Regional Police Command, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mrs Effia Tenge, the father of the girl who went into hiding was arrested Tuesday, February 18, 2020, through the effort of the school authorities of the girl.
Teachers in the girl's school noticed some changes in the body and questioned her and told them the ordeal that during the one year her mother had been away, her father forcefully has sex with her daughter every night.
I prophesied about coronavirus but couldn't pronounce the name - Owusu Bempah
Reverend Isaac Owusu Bempah, Founder and leader of Glorious Word Power Ministry International, has disclosed that he gave a prophecy on the novel coronavirus that is killing people around the world.
He said he spoke about the virus but at that time he didn't know the name.
Speaking on Accra based Kasapa FM, Rev. Owusu Bempah said he is not surprised at the devastating nature of the virus due to what God revealed to him.
“I stood in my church and stated that a deadly disease will kill a lot of people in 2020 if we do not pray fervently. But I didn’t mention the name ‘coronavirus’ because I had never heard the name. What I know is Malaria, Hepatitis B and BP."
"Even if God had mentioned the name of the disease to me as ‘coronavirus I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it. Even now I find it very difficult to mention the name rightly.
Over 30 people perish in a gruesome accident at Kintampo.
Over thirty people have been reported dead in a head-on
the collision between a Yutong bus and sprinter bus at Kintampo this morning
Reports from the accident scene indicates that both cars burst into flames and only 6 people from both vehicles survived.
Kintampo-based Nkomode FM reports that about fifteen passengers have been burnt beyond recognition in the inferno and the accident happened occurred between Dawadawa 2 and Kawampe on the Kintampo-Tamale highway
the collision between a Yutong bus and sprinter bus at Kintampo this morning
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