Relief items meant for victims of dry spell in East Gonja municipality of the Savannah Region has allegedly been distributed to branch and ward executives of the National Democratic Congress.
Each of the branches received three bags of maize.
The branch executives visited the warehouse of the municipality on Monday, June, 2, 2025 with their Ghana Card to collect the bags of maize.
3News Savannah regional correspondent Christopher Amoako was nearly assaulted by some of the branch executives when he questioned why the relief items were distributed to party boys instead of the registered victims.
It took the intervention of some passersby to save him,
“Yes, we are party branch executives and we were called to come for the maize so what can you do about it?” one asked.
“NPP diverted rice and fertilizer and you the media didn’t say anything so what’s your business if we are also benefiting?”he asked.
“If you joke, we will beat you here and nothing will happen to us because we are in power,” he added.
As at the time of filing this report, more than half of the relief items had been taken away.
When contacted, Municipal Chief Executive for East Gonja, Kassim Yazid condemned the near attack on Christopher Amoako but maintained that the data on the victims were missing and that he directed the Municipal Agric Directorate to collate fresh data of farmers to do the distribution.
He denied that the items were distributed to party executives.
“We cannot trace all the data of farmers and so I asked the Agric officers to take fresh data and proceed with the distribution. Maybe they distributed and some remained and they decided to consider party executives but what I know is that farmers were considered,” he explained.
In August 2024, over 600, 000 farmers in eight regions across the country were affected by a dry spell.
The Finance Minister then, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam at a meet the press series, announced that government is allocating 8 billion cedis to address the impact of the dry spell on farmers.
He revealed that apart from the GH¢500 billion that is feasible to be generated, the government was collaborating with other agencies to raise additional GH¢3 billion to be able to get the GH¢8 billion to fund government support for the programme.
“GH¢2.5 billion will come from the contingency fund, development partners,” he said. “It is a crisis and others are already feeling it. It is important that government responds”.
