The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Tuesday this week, commissioned a four-block accommodation unit comprising 64 apartments for the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).
The facility, ‘New Douala Barracks,’ is part of the government’s barracks regeneration project launched in 2017 to address the accommodation challenges of the GAF.
“Today, 64 families will be the beneficiaries of four new blocks of 64 apartments. Each of these apartments has a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and standard sanitary facilities. It is gratifying to note that similar ongoing accommodation projects are nearing completion at the various garrisons across the country,” President Akufo-Addo said.
It is an undeniable fact that accommodation is major problem confronting, not only the military, but all the security agencies. These are people who are providing security for the state, but the buildings some of them are living in can best be described as death traps. A visit to most of the barracks throughout the country, especially those belonging to the Police and Prisons Services, will reveal the horrible state some of them are living in.
In this modern age, why should even constables in the Police Service and their counterparts in the Prisons Service be living in a single room with their wives and children? Regrettably, this is the reality on the ground, as some of the senior officers are sometimes provided with the same accommodation.
Even though the concept of housing police officers in particular at one place was one the legacies the British colonisers left for us, they are today not implementing the same policy in the United Kingdom. Their police personnel stay among the population and commute to their work places each day. If Ghana has refused or failed to follow suit by giving accommodation grants to its security officers to hire their own rooms, and rather prefer to house them at one place, then we have the duty to give them decent accommodation.
It is in the light of this that The Chronicle finds the steps being taken by the current administration to provide decent accommodation for the military a laudable initiative. According to the Defence Minister, Dominic Nitiwul, who also spoke at the same function, the government has so far invested about GH¢680 million into the barracks regeneration programme. If this statement is anything to go by, one can extrapolate that the Akufo-Addo government has done a lot for the military.
But, as we have already pointed out, the Police, Immigration, Fire and Prison services are also suffering acute shortage of accommodation and must be given equal attention. The conditions some of these security personnel live in, especially in the rural areas, are simply awful. When the Comptroller General of the Ghana Immigration Service visited some of the border posts last year, the poor state of accommodation of the personnel came to the fore.
As a developing country, we have limited resources, but equitable distribution of the little that we have would bring about equilibrium, though this is not to say that the security services we have mentioned have been totally neglected by the government.
They are getting the support, but they need more. Over to you Mr President!
The post Editorial: Military, Police, Immigration et al, indeed deserve decent accommodation appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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