VEEP BAWUMIA SCANDALOUS CHINESE STREET NAMING ANGERS NAVRONGO

The sudden pop-up of embossed plates with foreign and unfamiliar names on the streets of Navrongo has agitated residents, Whatsup News can report.

 On a portion of the once straight branching road from the back of Navro-pio’s Palace leading to Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Minor Basilica, houses after the New Market now bear Broccolini Flowers as the street name in total contradiction to what the street is called by locals.

A search through public procurement documents hasn’t confirmed or revealed any such transaction through an open tender at the National Procurement Authority, but the contract reportedly derives from its connection to Vice-President Bawumia, who reportedly endorsed the project. 

The project is believed to have circumvented transparent procurement process through open tender.

Meanwhile, speaking on condition of anonymity, a staff of the Fiscal Planning Department of the Kasena Nankana Municipal Assembly confirmed, that the entire Navrongo Central community was actively engaged in exhaustive and extensive consultations for their suggestions on suitable names for their streets, but none of these names were reportedly used.

“I don’t know why, but when we took delivery of stock of the embossed plates, none of the submitted names from our office appeared on them,” he added.

Referring to one of the new streets named Broccolini Flowers Street, a resident who only gave his name as Adoah, said in Kasem,”We can’t pronounce the name, not to talk of its meaning. We don’t even know what it means.” 

“They didn’t even ask or consult us before bringing it to us,” another resident fumed.

An elder of the community who lives on the street, Augustine Kobati confirms the anger, “This area of Central Navrongo is called Yipugnia-Nogsenia. Our ancestor, Kwonzange first settled here. Had the Kasena Nankana Municipal Assembly consulted us to make input into the national mapping and street naming exercise, we could ask for them to honour our forefather Kwonzange.”

Checks on the embossment contract indicate that the whole process was motivated by pecuniary interest above all other interests. The checks revealed, that before the submission of the local names to begin the process of the embossment, Vice-President Bawumia had already given go-ahead for a Chinese firm to trigger the process. 

The national mapping and street naming exercise was the brainchild of Julius Debrah, who was the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, at the time. 

According to details of the initial process initiated by Julius Debrah, MMDCEs were given a deadline of eight months to submit proposed names for the exercise. They were further recommended to engage with communities and opinion leaders to deliberate on befitting and suitable names at the instance of locals of the particular MMDAs. But the process somehow stalled.

The offices of the Fiscal Planning Department of the Kasena Nankana Municipal Assembly is littered with cases of piled imported Chinese embossed plates bearing a variety of such strange and difficult-to-mention names unrelated to the ancestry, geography, and history of the people.