The Upper West Regional Youth Parliament has advocated a fair share of the distribution of street lights to urban towns, particularly the Wa municipality.
The parliament, through a study conducted on the topic; “Assessing Private Security Accountability in the Wamunicipality” whose aim was in part to assess the functionality of streetlights for night visibility and crime prevention, revealed that fully functional street lights were in acute shortage in the municipality.
This, it said, plunged a greater part of the municipality into darkness at night and gave room for activities of criminals and other unscrupulous persons to fester.
Addressing the media on the findings of the study, the speaker of the youth parliament, Mr James Baba Anabiga, wondered; “where is our share of the three percent streetlight levy we pay to government each time we buy power?”
The speaker walked the media through some areas in the municipality that according to their checks were either not having street lights or the lights were just not functioning.
He listed among others the AmpofoStreet,which is behind the Regional Coordinating Council (RCC), the Excellence Street, Tindamba Crossing, Amora Street and Alhaji Salam Street as part of the streets without functional streetlights.
“Out of a total of 30 streets in the Wa township, some of which are on the peripheral, only one, the Ieper street, had fully functional streetlights, five of them did not have streetlights installed at all, nine were partially functional and as many as 15 streets in the regional capital have streetlights which were notfunctional,” he enumerated.
Mr Anabiga was concerned about the safety of even the police personnel who were deployed to such areas and asked how they would fight crime in the dark.
“In this era of mysterious killings in Wa, we demand that our share of the street lights levy as a municipality be given to us so that crime can be prevented; we cannot continue to live in fear and darkness when we have paid for street lights,” he said.
He appealed to government, the RCC and the municipal assembly to as a matter of urgency help install street lights at very critical areas where people could hide and perpetrate crime.
The study also recommended that in the interim, police visibility be doubled in such areas to ensure that inhabitants were better protected at night.
FROM LYDIA DARLINGTON FORJOUR, WA
