News:
June 15, 2020
Member of Parliament for Afram Plains North, Betty Nana Efua Krosbi Mensah has dismissed notion that she is encouraging and promoting child labour by defending parents who introduce their wards to work.
According to her leaders who have been elected to represent the larger population should properly define what hazardous work is and provide alternatives to ensure children are provided with the rightful way to live and to enjoy being children.
In an interview with journalists in Parliament she pointed out that there are one hundred and fifty communities in her constituency with a limited number of one hundred and thirteen day basic schools, “what becomes of children in such communities who do not have schools?”
Again, she advised that issues of child labour should be looked at in a broader perspective and not play politics and be emotional, as those children would grow up and if parents are not impacting their occupation and knowledge in them, when the child attain eighteen and needs to fend for himself what profession does he have?
In addition, we should not come to Parliament and do the usual politics, governments talk about social intervention programmes going to the rural communities, she added that if they were really going to rural communities children would not migrate into the urban cities.
According to her, if government were committed to all these things social interventions and those who deserve it are really being impacted, parents and children would not have been migrating from the rural communities to urban centres.
Madam Krosbi Mensah further expressed worry over the school feeding programme being implemented in Accra whiles in communities in Afram Plains North children are suffering. They don’t have schools neither do they benefit from the social interventions. “At the end we are not having solution to the problems we talk about”
She made this remarks on Friday June 12, 2020 when the Minister for Employment and Labour Relations Ignatius Baffour Awuah made a statement on International Labour day.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com