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Gbirma, Ghana – The Sagnarigu Municipal Chief Executive, Mariam Iddrisu has clashed with Chief of Gbirma, a community where she ordered the closure of a health facility after local health authorities received medical items from the Member of Parliament, Alhassan Suhuyini, without her assent.
The facility which had been in operation for more than a year, now remained shut for weeks and all health workers have been drove out from the community, leaving poor residents to now have to travel many kilometers to Taha, Fuo and Tamale, the regional capital, to seek medical care.
The facility serves two other communities- Wovugu and Wovoguma. Residents are mostly cut off during rainy season due to bad roads, which had forced them to rely on traditional healers and bicycle riding unskilled practitioners for delivery.
According to the assemblyman, Mohammed Inusah Wanzam, the MCE ordered the closure three weeks ago after the MP donated the items to the facility, claiming that residents had no “right” to use the facility because the contractor had not handed over and she had also not officially inaugurated it.
Inusah Wanzam said the MCE phoned him and instructed that the items be removed from the facility and given to the community “for them to find a place to keep it”.
She also ordered the nurses occupying the building to vacate and asked for the keys to be sent to her at her residence in Tamale.
“The nurses have been working since last year without a facility. Somebody built his house and plastered it, without entering into it. We begged that person to give that house to the nurses for use. This year, the man said he wants to enter that house so we should release that house for him but the MCE said the nurses cannot use the facility, so three weeks they have stopped coming”, the assemblyman told Ultimate News.
However, when the sub metro director of health came into the village with a vehicle to remove the items as instructed, the chief of the community, Alhaji Mohammed Abu resisted and summoned the MCE.
The assemblyman said the MCE came into the community the next day and in the meeting with the chief she said she feared a lawsuit from the contractor because the facility had not been handed over to her office by the contractor.
She said also she needed to commission the facility before it would be operational.
The chief, according to the assemblyman, that facility be shut but refused the MCE’s order for the items, donated by the MP, to be removed from the facility. A day has since been fixed for the MCE to inaugurate the facility.
The health workers were rendered homeless by the development and they were forced to leave the community, the assemblyman added.
The MCE, Madam Mariam has not responded to requests from Ultimate News for comments of the matter.
Suhuyini on May 6, 2018, made a double donation of a cache of medical items to the facilities at Kulaa and the Gbrima community. The two facilities had been completed and nurses posted without health delivery items. Patients were treated on wooden benches and bare floor.
On the day of donation, the MCE refused to honor a letter inviting her office to the function.
She is yet to respond why she turned down the invitation from the MP.
Madam Mariama Iddrisu last year was saved by the chief of Sagnarigu after assembly members intended to impeach her for amongst other reasons an alleged gross disrespect.
Confusion again ensued between her and some NPP members in the constituency that nearly marred a retreat function she organized with the party members.
Just last week, she controversially expelled journalists from covering a meeting between her office and members of the Ghana Federation of Disability Organization protesting over the delay in payment of their share of the Common Fund.
Source: Ultimatefmonline.com
