An outcry for irrigation dams from extremely frail old people, said to be wallowing in chronic hunger and protracted neglect in the Nabdam District of the Upper East Region, has climaxed a rare party held in their honour by some natives of the area.
Among the vulnerable beneficiaries are widows, persons with disabilities and cured lepers.
The district is among the extremely deprived areas of the region with about 33, 826 people per the 2010 Population and Housing Census. Elderly people, as statistics also shows, constitute 6.8% of that figure. A number of the aged, particularly those with physical disabilities, suffer a great deal of neglect and hunger almost throughout the year.
Although they engage in subsistence farming, the outcomes mostly are nothing but thankless harvests as they often are too little to carry them through the regular 8 months of dry season to the next 4 months of farming. This has been linked to extreme shortfall of irrigation dams- said to be as rare in the area as fertilisers are difficult to come by for several households or local farmworkers.
Community development organisations as well as public officers have said that many old people in the district hardly “see” a one-cedi note or a red coin throughout an entire month. The chronic hunger often reaches a level where families will have no choice but to turn to the forests to survive on wild fruits, risking unscheduled encounters with wild animals.
“Our situation here is very bad, especially for the vulnerable people in society. We are a farming community. We have only one raining season. After the raining season, our people find it difficult to feed, especially the vulnerable. What they resort to as feed would be to go to the forests to look for wild fruits,” the Assemblyman for Kongo East, Patrick Dinaa, told Starr News.
He added: “It is difficult for many of them to even see one cedi within a month. Some go gathering stones to crack for those doing construction. But you ask, for someone who cannot walk well, how many months is he going to use to gather stones for one trip?”
Hunger peaks when our ground dries- old folks
The hunger endured throughout 2016 amongst the helpless group ended somewhat on a happy note when a young man from the area, Paul Wooma, sourced support from some benevolent individuals and organisations to throw a party for about 700 vulnerable elderly people in the district.
More guests than what was expected thronged Yakote, venue for the all-day-long party towards which two bulls, bags of rice and drinks were donated. For the feeble-looking beneficiaries, who were bussed on free vehicles provided by the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) from their various communities and widely led by either old walking sticks or needy great grandchildren to the party ground, it was an occasion capped with a mixture of excitement for the temporary relief and a painful reminder of what Nabdams probably need more than anything else- dams!
“Dams for us and for our young men to do dry-season farming, we don’t have. Even our animals compete over small streams that normally get dry for water. I’m from Daborin at Kongo. Hunger is so unbearable when the rainy period is over,” Paul Nangodnab, a native in his early 80s wearing a Barcelona FC winter cap, told Starr News.
Mabil Zuri, in her 60s and full of praise for Mr. Wooma for the relief, pointed at another dilemma tied to food insecurity in the district. “Our challenge is not just the lack of dams. Generally, we also do not have good roads for the transportation of our produce to the markets to sell. But I must add that those of advanced years like me cannot do thorough farming. We rely on random handouts in this area to survive,” she lamented in Nabt, the district’s dialect.
A dream for sustainable food aid
The deprived rural old folks certainly will continue to stagger in starvation until rare occasions like the Yakote party come their way another time.
And this could take a very long time to happen, prompting questions as to how sustainable support can reach that defenceless old bracket. Interacting with Starr News, Mr. Wooma, a popular Climate Change advocate who calls his relief initiative “Operation Blessing”, disclosed plans to put in place a more reliable measure of support for as many as were too weak to fend for themselves in the district.
“I appeal to all that I will be writing letters again to them next year. They should readily support me to extend help to these people. This may be temporal. But I am ringing bells- humanitarian bells- that there is a need to help the vulnerable in society.
“I told the vulnerable people that my aim is to finally have farms dedicated to just farming food for them, storing it in these FASCOM (Farmers Services Company) buildings that were there in Acheampong’s days and distributing it at critical periods. They would just line up. I would distribute the food. And go away. That is the ultimate goal,” he stated amid adoring words for those who supported the feeding of the old men and women.
