Alhaji Abubakar Saddique Boniface
The Minister Designate for Inner Cities and Zongo Development as well as the Member of Parliament for Madina; Alhaji Abubakar Saddique Boniface has revealed that the much anticipated Zongo Development Fund will offer some form of social security for inner city dwellers across the country.
According to him, the fund when rolled out in line with the vision of the president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, will provide tailor-made scholarship schemes to brilliant but needy students from the Zongos.
He said it is the intention of the president to use the fund to develop the human resource base of the inner city dwellers.
He said by so doing, inner city dwellers that are associated with thuggery and other social misfits will be curtailed.
He maintained that the interventions that will be rolled out after his vetting by Parliament will serve as a form of social security for Zongos in the country.
According to him quite often people from the Zongo areas with the desire to acquire tertiary education settle for any course thrown at them at the university and after they complete, they are left with no job.
All these are happening because they choose the wrong course at the university – the fund will periodically organized seminars for secondary school leavers in the zongoes to know the kind of course to choose at the university level that will fetch them jobs after completion
The Minister Designate gave a snapshots of how he intend to use the fund to better the lot of inner city dwellers when he led executives of the party to join the La-Nkwatanang Municipal National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) Coordinator, Imam Mohammed to present some relief items to a house hold adjacent the Madina Melcom area that got burnt.
The items worth 1,500 Ghana Cedis made up of used clothings, mattresses, blankets, bowls, cups, roofing sheets, Mosquito nets, Mosquito repellents among others were presented to the landlord, Awudu Amadu Saani, whose house got burnt a week ago as a result of an electrical fault.
Handing over the items, the NADMO coordinator appealed to the residents of the area to ensure all their electrical gadgets were put off before leaving their homes or retiring to bed to avoid the occurrence of such disasters.
He said because the weather is dry as a result of the Harmattan, fires are ignited in the area without a known cause.
And to avoid them “we need to make sure we don’t leave our rooms with our electrical gadgets on or sleep with our electrical gadgets on.”
“You must make sure you put off these gadgets before retiring to bed,” he warned.
He added that the items were to cushion the household since they have lost majority of their belongings in the fire.
On his part; the Assemblyman for the area, Alhaji Danjumah commended the youth in the area for their timely intervention in ensuring the fire was doused before the fire servicemen came in.