Tension is building at Aformanorkorfe in the Central Tongu District of the Volta Region as the DCE and MP continue to linger in commissioning a clinic for the community.
Aformanorkorfe is a farming community with about 2,000 dwellers.
Infrastructures are a severe deficiency in the area so the people cover 34 kilometers to and from Adidome to access better education and health care.
Their roads are so deplorable that patients and nursing mothers, who need to be rushed to the Adidome Government Hospital, are carried on bicycles.
Due to the high mortality rate in the area, the previous NDC government, the residents told Awake News, completed a health center before it lost the 2016 general elections.
Seeing the completed structure abandoned for about five years now, without the Member of Parliament (MP) or District Chief Executive (DCE) communicating the reason for the long delay in opening the facility, Aformanorkorfe said is cruelty.
“If this health center is opened, the routine inconveniences of traveling on bicycles from here to Adidome for healthcare will cease. This facility must be commissioned to start operation because the longer this structure is not occupied, the weaker it becomes and before long, it will develop cracks and that will be another waste of the taxpayers’ money,” Divine Woegbe, the Youth Leader of Aformanorkorfe, told Awake News as he toured the reporter round the facility.
He said in case of an urgent health service before a patient is rushed to Adidome, the patient or expectant mother is ridden a pillion to the next village where some ‘village health providers’ manage the condition.
“The deplorable roads discourage commercial vehicles from coming here. As a result, some patients in emergency die on the way to Adidome. A bicycle is the commonest vehicle here for carrying patients or expectant mothers to the next village where, if we are lucky, we get some rickety car to convey us to Adidome. If we don’t get it, then we have to ride 17 kilometers to Adidome for healthcare,” he explained.
That Aformanorkorfe cannot go on that way with the health center yet to be commissioned, Mr Woegbe said: “We, the youth and people of Aformanorkorfe, have resolved to occupy the offices and residences of our MP and DCE if they don’t open this clinic for us after one month. We will inconvenience them until they get the facility working for the reason it’s put up.”
By: Umar Sheriff Musah/Awakenewsroom.com