But for the huge investments in a multi-purpose educational, religious and recreational projects Royal House Chapel is embarking on at Agortor, the area would have been more miserable than it is now, Awake News has observed.
Agortor is a low Savannah belt and one of the most deprived farming communities with dire infrastructure needs in the Shai-Osudoku District in Greater Accra. The people mostly rare sheep and cattle and grow pepper especially.
Agortor has hamlets and the commonest and fastest means of transportation from Tsopoli, a town after the Saglemi Affordable Housing from the West, along the Tema-Aflao highway, to Agortor and its hamlets is a motorbike. The roads are dusty and hardly motorable when it rains.
The town has only two public schools-primary and junior high-and one abandoned health center where bats have virtually succeeded in making the place uncomfortable and inhabitable for health personnel who have deserted the facility. What is more? The health center has become a haven for wild reptiles as it is overgrown with weeds. Its doors and windows have been destroyed.
Parts of the abandoned Agortor health center
Consequently, the sick or residents who need health care travel long distances on their bad dusty or muddy roads to Akuse, Ashaiman, Prampram or Tema to be attended to.
How a stretch of the Tsopoli-Agortor looks
Access to potable water is another challenge to Agortor and its hamlets which are not far from the lower Volta Basin. In view of this, residents contribute some money to tractor operators or pick up vehicle drivers who travel to Tsopoli to fill tanks for domestic use.
Residents who are unable to raise some money to get potable water supplied to them from Tsopoli have an option of collecting and storing rain water or depending on water from a dam, which is both for irrigation purposes and animals’ use.
Indeed, the people of Agortor and its hamlets struggle to make ends meet.
All these huge physical development challenges notwithstanding, Royal House Chapel’s huge capital investment at Agortor is gradually opening up the area.
The church has acquired a large tract of land on a lease for a multi-purpose educational and religious infrastructure, an investment, that is contributing to the gradual development of the community.
In an interview with Awake News, the chief of Agortor, Nene Kwetey II said, the church often sinks huge capital in the leveling of the road when resources are available to it.
“During such time, vehicles are able to move to and fro easily,” he noted.
The previous government began bitumen road construction works from Agortor to Tsopoli Nyigbenya but Nene Kwetey II said, the project had halted since government changed.
“Political figures including past and present DCEs don’t visit us but we vote. We are only recognised by our paramountcy. You have come to see Agortor and we pray that you carry our concerns to those who call the shots”.
“Our lands are fertile for agriculture and our people are ready to lease lands for projects that will create decent employment for my people. Our lands are not for outright sale…we are ready to lease them,” Nene Teye Kwetey II explained.
Agortor and its hamlets have benefitted from successive governments’ rural electrification projects and so, there is hardly a mud house that is not connected to the national grid, and so the rural folks are current with news in the country.
Aside a few homes that own one or two television sets, most of the youth of Agortor and its hamlets own smart phones so they are abreast with Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Perhaps, with these gadgets, they entertain themselves despite the sorry narrative of Agortor.
By: Umar Sheriff Musah