In the spirit of transparency, accountability and in line with her social contract with her constituents, the Member of Parliament for Dome/Kwabenya, Faustina Elikplim Akurugu is to replicate the state of the Nation Address in her constituency dubbed ‘State of the Constituency Address (SOCA).
This novelty, she stated is hoped to promote inclusive governance to carry the people along the path of development.
According to her just as Presidents of Ghana are mandated by the constitution to give Message of the State of the Nation Address (SONA), she is going to be accountable to her constituents every year and that will push her to work harder, “because at the end of the year, I need to go and face my constituents, and they will question me and give me advice as governance is not for one person. We have to come together as a community when you go to various communities, they will have various problems and they will let you know what they want you to address first”, she said in an interview with Ghanamps.com.
She emphasised the importance of consulting the constituents especially when one is taking development projects to the various communities, as she recounted her experience working with World Vision, stating that at some point “when we went to a village, we did not consult with the people over there, children move from one village to another to draw water; we were thinking they needed borehole without consulting them.
Then we dug a borehole for them. We came back to assess how the borehole provided to the community was going, but we noted that the children continued to go somewhere else to draw water”.
“We had to go and sit down with people in the Community as to why they were not using the borehole. When we did, we noticed that when you get to the village, there is only one room that the parents and children shared. In the morning, the parents will intentionally ask the children to go and draw water; they go far by the time they come back whatever the father and mother have to do will be done before the children come back. So, the borehole we built rather went in there to destabilize the way they do their things”.
This has therefore been her experience over the years and has given her reason to always engage people and get their priorities as to what they want first.
Meanwhile, she affirmed that SOCA would be done alongside regular Town Hall meetings.
The MP who was speaking on her vision for the Dome/Kwabenya constituency also noted that safety and security will be given attention as she pointed out that last week Monday, she toured the whole constituency to ascertain the state of things currently. And as part of her observation, it came out that the lightening system is poor, so she has taken it upon herself to lighten up the constituency.
Again, the constituency does not have a fire tender in case of fire outbreak, so a call has to be placed for a fire tender station at either Madina or Amasaman and it’s a worrying development.
In the area of job creation, she said she will explore various avenues to create job opportunities to the youth including training about thousand constituents in skills in artificial intelligence (AI), among other scholarship opportunities.
Also, she disclosed that they will be tapping into the President’s free TVET agenda as well as take advantage of local contents in terms of infrastructure developments in the constituency.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com
