Ghana Broadcasting Corporation

Power, they say corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At long last the people of Zimbabwe have said good bye to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, their President who ruled them for 37 years and welcomed to the throne his then Vice President and Chief Strategist Emmerson Mnangagwa. But for the love of a woman and inordinate quest for power, Mr. Mugabe would have still been enjoying his Presidency. Sacking his Vice President ostensibly to bring in his wife, Grace to take over from him was the rod that broke the camel`s back. At age 93, Mr. Mugabe needed nobody to tell him that he should have quit when the applause was loudest but he allowed greed and lust for power to goad him on. At the end of it all, even his own party, Zanu PF and his war veterans deserted him and passed a vote of no confidence in him. The jubilation that greeted his resignation is enough to tell Mr. Mugabe that all that glitters is not gold. Simply put, Mr. Mugabe reduced himself to the likes of Yahaya Jammeh of Gamb...

Last week, the National Sanitation Campaign was launched by the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the theme, Let's Keep Ghana Clean, Play Your Part. The campaign marks the beginning of series of activities to be implemented by the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources and all its stakeholders to rid the cities and towns of filth. It also marks the beginning of yet another national drive to make the nation clean for Sustainable National Development and the promotion of good health. The launch was significant especially against the backdrop of the declaration by the President that by the end of his first term in office, he would make Accra the neatest and cleanest city in Africa. There is no doubt that one of the key issues today in national discourse is on sanitation, environmental pollution and land degradation due to the impact on the socio- economy of the country. It is estimated that poor sanitation practices in Ghana costs about $290 million per annum which is a dr...

At long last the new Driver's Licence and Vehicle Registration Smart Cards introduced by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, DVLA, has been launched. This means that new applicants will be issued with the new Driver's Licence. The journey started from the 18th July this year but was halted for further consultations with stakeholders such as Driver's Unions. After all the consultations and discussions, the issuance of the new smart cards took off November 7. The initiative is to ensure that qualified persons acquire licence to drive. It is also to eliminate the cumbersome process of acquiring licence and vehicle registration documents. This will eliminate the activities of middlemen popularly called ‘goro boys’ who most of the time issue fake licence to people who patronise their services. The smart Driver's Licence has security features that will make it impossible for anyone to duplicate. It has contactless chip with a high memory for the storage of bio data an...

The recent sad story of a 4-year old girl defiled by a man in Assin Adadientem in the Central Region is not only shameful, but depressing, heart-breaking, and criminal. Even more worrying, is the alleged clandestine attempts by prominent people in society such as the Chief of the area to obstruct justice for the victim based on the verdict of the community gods. Although rape and defilement cases have been with us in Ghana since time immemorial, the high rate at which the menace is occurring in recent times in different parts of the country is a real cause for concern. This is in view of the devastating and often damning consequences of defilement on the health of the girl child and society as a whole. A Ghana News Agency report of 9th July, 2003 cited infertility, trauma, the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, STDs, and terminal illness and even death as some of the negative effects of defilement. While commending the efforts of government, NGOs and individuals in the fight...

Ghana over the weekend witnessed another gas explosion which occurred at a gas filling station at atomic Junction on the Legon - Madina route. Latest figures put the death toll at seven with one hundred and thirty-two persons injured out of which sixty-four have been discharged and sixty-eight still receiving treatment. Ghana has since 2014 recorded at least eight major gas related fires across the country. In all the eight cases, six were recorded in the Greater Accra Region, one in Takoradi in the Western Region, and another at Kasoa in the Central Region. According to statistics, about 250 lives have been lost in gas explosions in the last ten years, with the most severe being the June 3, 2015 disaster in which about 150 people died. Collectively, we keep brooding over such incidents. Government officials and other people of influence, join the rest of us to express our condolences, yet no radical corrective action is taken to improve the situation. In all the previous explosions, g...

The time has come for unruly party foot soldiers to be tamed. Quite naturally and justifiably, many well-meaning Ghanaians are disgusted about the fines imposed on the members of the Delta Force, a foot-soldiering group associated with the NPP, whose members took the law into their own hands in Kumasi and physically assaulted a public officer who they thought did not merit an appointment. They further caused mayhem at a Kumasi Circuit Court where they assisted other members to escape from lawful custody. Indeed, the fine may appear not deterrent enough in the face of the brazen effrontery with which they carried out their criminal activities. But the fact that they went through the court process, were charged, tried and fine, make them ex-convicts. Situate that against the situation in December 2008, during the general election when some bandits attacked some polling stations in Akwatia and carried away ballot boxes. A number of the bandits were arrested and put on trial. They were rem...

Children whose parents keep pets such as dogs and cats sometimes fall in love with these pets to such an extent that disposing of them becomes a problem. Owners of pets usually give interesting names to them depending on their keepers moods and situations they find themselves. Though man's best and faithful friend, dogs transmit rabies to humans with children being the most affected. Rabies is a fatal disease of warm blooded beasts, transmitted through the bite of an infected animal. Ninety-nine percent of rabies cases result from the bite of an infected dog, though cats, bats and other mammals are carriers. Rabies is said to be a neglected disease of poor and vulnerable populations whose deaths are rarely reported. It occurs mainly in remote rural communities where measures to prevent dog to human transmission have not been implemented. Under reporting of rabies also prevents mobilisation of resources from the international community for the elimination of human dog- mediated rabi...