The Police and City guards are patrolling the New Juaben Municipality in aftermath of a massive decongestion exercise on Wednesday.
The patrol team is roaming on major streets to block recalcitrant hawkers who may attempt to return to the streets today being a market day in Koforidua.
Massive decongestion exercise hit the New Juaben south municipality Wednesday, March 9, 2022.
The exercise was led by the Eastern regional minister Seth Kwame Acheampong, the MCE Isaac Appaw Gyasi, and the Member of Parliament for the New Juaben South Michael Okyere Baafi, and a team of security personnel led by the Eastern regional MTTD police commander Chief superintendent Stephen Ahiatafo.
Hon. Seth Kwame Acheampong, the Eastern Regional minister reiterated that it’s about time that citizens come together to ensure that the laws of the land work without any political interference to foster the developmental agenda in the interest of the country.
He said, “the assembly is there to regulate and enforce the laws in a direction that will instill discipline in citizenry as to where and when to do things properly to ease human and vehicular traffic in the Koforidua township and its environs”.
“We wish to assure them that we will not relent on our guards, we will continue to engage them and see what we can do to help them go on their normal trades so that anybody can get something to his or her family, therefore we will entreat them to abide by any directive given to them by our law enforcers to ensure a peaceful coexistence between the assembly and it citizens” he explained.
The Municipal Chief executive Hon. Isaac Appaw Gyasi added that there has been a series of town hall meetings for all the key stakeholders like the market queens and women, shop owners, trotro drivers, taxi drivers, churches, and all the transport unions over the past four months whereby they were given alternative markets where they can go and embark on their trade.
“Moving forward we are so determined to make sure that nobody return to trade at an unauthorized place near the roadside, every day we will make sure that the city guards are always on the streets to ensure that Koforidua works normally again,” he said.
Hon. Okyere Baafi also urged residents of the municipality to support the government initiative as well as the decongestion exercise being carried out in the New Juaben South municipality so that all forms of indiscipline acts come to an end to make Koforidua clean and neat.
He said even though there was resistance among some of the traders but after the exercise, he hopes that there will be sanity and discipline in the Koforidua Township.
However speaking to some of the traders, they agitated that places allocated to them to embark on their trading activities are not accessible and visible to customers therefore they are requesting for an expansion of the already existing markets so that it can accommodate them.
Source: Mybrytnewsroom.com/Obed Ansah
