Former President John Dramani Mahama, the flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has refuted claims that guinea fowls under the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) initiative flew to Burkina Faso during his tenure in 2014.
According to the former President, “No guinea fowl flew to Burkina Faso. Guinea fowls are not migratory birds and the project was not for you to come and see thousands of guinea fowls in one place. It was supposed to incubate the eggs and give the guinea fowls’ day-old chicks to farmers”.
The former President said this on Wednesday when a media encounter in Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region.
He added “And so somebody came and asked the watchman, ‘Where are the guinea fowls? And the watchman said, they go Burkina Faso, they go come back in the rainy season.’ The media went and published it. And after some people believed some guinea fowls flew to Burkina Faso. So that project died. But I think it is a project we can look at again.”
He explained that “There was supposed to be a processing plant so that the guinea fowls would be bought off the households and processed. And they would put them in frozen trucks to send them down to the south to the market. Unfortunately, the project ran into issues. The media criticised it, and they came and said the guinea fowls had flown to Burkina Faso.”
With Mahama admission of the failure of the project, millions of cedis sunk into it had gone down the drain.
Mr Mahama lamented that the project involved incubating guinea fowl eggs and distributing day-old chicks to farmers for rearing, rather than confining the birds to an enclosed area.
He also recalled that a watchman’s comment about the guinea fowls migrating to Burkina Faso was taken out of context and published, leading to widespread misinformation.
The former President emphasized that guinea fowls are not migratory birds and that the project aimed to support farmers by providing them with day-old chicks.
-BY Daniel Bampoe