The Vice President of the Upper East Regional House of Chiefs says the willingness of chiefs to support the fight against open defecation in Ghana is utterly challenged because they have been stripped of their prosecutorial powers all in the name of freedom of speech and expression.
According to Naba Baba Salifu Lemyaruum, who doubles as the Paramount Chief of the Bongo Tradition Area, unlike in the past when chiefs could punish people who violated socio-cultural norms on many issues including open defecation, same cannot be done today because lawyers and human rights activists will strongly jump to their defence in courts and sometimes, secure compensation for the offenders on grounds of violation of their fundamental human rights.
Naba Lemyaruum said this at the regional launch of Social Norms Campaign on open defecation in Bolgatanga on Thursday, December 14, 2017. The campaign is a component of the Open Defecation Free Ghana Campaign recently launched by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. It is an initiative of the government of Ghana with support from the United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF)-Ghana and aimed at creating awareness on the dangerous effects of open defecation on the wellbeing of the human population.
In the Upper East Region, about 82% of people practice open defecation thereby placing the region first on open defecation in Ghana. Currently, Bolgatanga and Kassena-Nankana Municipal and Nabdam district assemblies, all in the Upper East Region have scored 0% each in the fight against Open Defecation. Meanwhile, Garu-Tempane district with 41% has been adjudged the best performing district among all 13 assemblies in the region.
Visibly perturbed about these disturbing trends, Naba Lemyarumm regretted that if chiefs were still wielding the powers they had in the past, open defecation could not have been a canker because they would be slapping offenders with varied forms of punishment to deter the rest from engaging in it.
Grieving over their handicap, the chief said: “The cause of this canker today, where we are allocating money to tell people that stop open defecation is a making of we ourselves and the government. I am saying this because even in the past, our ancestors knew where to defecate. They had special places where people go to defecate. When you are going to defecate, you don’t go just bare hands. You must go with a hoe or cutlass and dig a hole and bury your faecal matter. You couldn’t just go and shit on somebody’s farmland. Even if the fellow doesn’t catch you, if you go there, after shitting your anus would come out because they have protected the place spiritually. So when we were children, we knew certain places that you couldn’t go to defecate. But today, why have all these things stopped is just because, we say democracy, freedom of everything, freedom to the extent that we have to shit in front of our homes and nobody can talk.” He grieved.
“Today let a chief sanction anybody for free defecation. He will send him [chief] to court and take a lawyer and the lawyer will begin putting it on the chief. So today, it is we, who have caused all these issues. The powers that the chiefs had, have been taken away from them and chiefs now look like a toothless bulldog. We are no longer as strong as we used to be but bet me, if they had restored all those powers to us, we don’t need to sit here and pledge that nobody should defecate freely. I will make sure that if you defecate [openly] and you are caught in Bongo, I will know what to do to you. So we don’t have the backing and that is why we are also coiling. He further bemoaned.
He, however, said all is not lost because he was happy when President Akufo-Addo recently declared ‘stop open defecation’.
Naba Lemyaruum, on behalf of all the chiefs and Queen Mother in the region, pledged their support for the fight against open defecation and appealed to the president to also restore their powers to them to enable them to sanction their subjects who defecate openly.
“Give us the legal backing so that if we get anybody committing such a crime, we can take action and the government and the law will support it’, He pleaded.
Source:TopNewsGhana.com
