The people of the border town of Agotime-Afegame in the AgotimeZiope District of the Volta Region have been held “hostage” in their homes for the past two weeks in the wake of dwindling food stocks.
This follows heavy rains which destroyed various portions of the 9.5kilometre untarred road from Agotime-Beh, along the Ho-Aflao road, to the town.
Agotime-Afegame (inset)
A section of the demonstrators
A journey on the road by car which under normal circumstances took 10 minutes could now take an hour or more due to the nightmarish nature of the road.
In the absence of cellular phone signals, the community which has about 1,300 inhabitants is now in a grave state of uncertainty and anxiety as the people can hardly contact their relative in other parts of the country.
So far, two ailing people in Agotime-Afegame have died due the bad road which made it impossible for them to be transported to a bigger health facility outside the town.
The angry people of the community yesterday embarked on a demonstration to draw the government’s attention to their plight and called for immediate steps to reconnect the town to the rest of the country.
A spokesman of the town, Mr James Afanu later said at a media briefing that the road leading to Agotime-Afegame from the Beh junction was constructed between 1972 and 1973.
For more than 48 years, he said, the only rehabilitation seen on the road had been occasional reshaping.
However, recent rains had now rendered the road extremely dangerous and virtually unusable to vehicles, Mr Afanu said.
As a result of the situation, he said all economic activities in the food basket town had come to standstill, after they had been deprived of their regular source of income which invariably was cross-border trading.
Meanwhile, Mr Afanu revealed that the huge harvests of vegetables and other food items produced by local farmers were being left on the farms to perish since they could no longer be conveyed to the usual markets in Kpetoe, Ziope and Ho.
FROM ALBERTO MARIO NORETTI, AGOTIME-AFEGAME
