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Media men and women, it is no exaggeration but an accepted fact that persons with disability, women and children are the hardest hit when conflicts degenerate into war or intermittent battles as we are witnessing at Bawku. The Ghana Federation of the Disabled, (GFD), undertook a facts-finding mission to Bawku to discover how PWDs are coping with the harsh realities of the recurring Bawku ethnic clashes and the stories we heard from them made our blood run cold.
Friends of the media, let me share some of the horrifying and harrowing experiences some P.W.Ds went through as a result of the factional fighting in Bawku.
On 1st January, 2008, with no ominous sign of exchange of fire and people were going about their normal duties including the P.W.D’s, suddenly exchange of gunfire began to rage between the warring factions in Bawku and the P.W.D’s with or without guide assistance joined the helter-skelter to seek refuge in safer places. One need not stretch his or her imagination to appreciate, the extreme difficulty with which the blind, the wheel chair user, those with crutches and the deaf who cannot immediately hear the exploding gun fire managed the life threatening situation.
On the fateful day we learnt that about fifteen houses were set ablaze and a physically disabled person in a wheel chair could not be helped by relatives to flee and was burnt to ashes. In the same circumstances, a blind person a well-known lab technician had his six room apartment razed to the ground by the blazing fire. He and his family are now being accommodated by a sympathizer. Another P.W.D. had his house riddled by bullets.
The factional fighting at Bawku has affected P.W.Ds in diverse ways. Shops belonging to some of them were vandalized and their working tools stolen thereby affecting their means of livelihood.
Our findings also showed that majority of them are unskilled and poor and they subsist on charity. With the state of insecurity coupled with long hours of curfew, they are unable to come out to solicit for help and one wonders how they have been surviving the pain and hunger that they are going through.
Ladies and Gentlemen it is not only the ethnic fighting in the northern part of Ghana that has affected the livelihoods of P.W.Ds adversely but also the floods resulting from the spillage from Bagry dam in Burkina Faso which destroyed some acreages of farm of those who are engaged in cereal and crop cultivation.
The P.W.Ds interviewed expressed grave concern that they were not given priority attention in the distribution of relief items and were made to join queues which sometimes never reached the turn of some of them. The effects of these ugly situations have been devastating and have worsened the misery and poverty of PWDs in these zones of conflict and disaster.
G.F.D. is adding its voice to the numerous calls on the feuding factions of Bawku to give peace a chance to allow the people including the P.W.Ds to go about their normal life. G.F.D. also appeals to the Governmental agencies like NADMO and Charity organizations to support P.W.Ds in these areas with food and other necessities of life until the situation normalizes to allow them fend for themselves.
We hope the media will take it from here and feature the plight of P.W.Ds in these areas of conflict and disaster in their reportage.
PS: The presentation is the address by Mr. Yaw Ofori Debrah, vice-president of the Ghana federation of the Disabled, at a Press Conference in Accra. |
