The decay in the town is not just about the poor state of the house of the late leader, which many have argued should not be the responsibility of the state to renovate, but also public facilities like the State motel, the Agric Secondary School, and the Nkrumah Mausoleum.

The Mausoleum and other facilities connected to Nkrumah, have been the motivation for an invitation of tourists on an official government website, where Nkroful, but no other town connected to the leader of the nation’s independence struggle, has been mentioned as a great place to visit.

Hon. Frederick Worsemao Armah Blay, the 55-year-old Catholic from Eikwe-Esiama, is the MP for Ellembelle Constituency, the constituency under which, Nkroful, the birthplace of the first president of the nation is located. Esiama is three kilometers away from Nkroful.

Hon. Blay is not just an ordinary legislator. He was the Second Deputy Speaker of the Ghanaian Parliament from 1996 to 2000, and progressed to become the First Deputy Speaker of the House from 2001 till now. For all his three parliamentary terms, he won on the ticket of the party Dr. Nkrumah founded, the Convention People’s Party (CPP).

Chiefs and opinion leaders of the town who interacted with The Chronicle’s reporters during a recent trip to the town, ceaselessly accused the MP of completely neglecting the town in terms of development and significantly blamed him for not doing anything at the place, not even a discussion with them in the face of the 50th anniversary celebration of Ghana’s Independence.

Apart from the charge of not having extended any developmental projects to the town, the people say the MP does not visit the constituency as expected, a charge Mr. Blay himself does not dispute. The MP admits the charge but attributes the situation to what he said were the huge financial implications of visiting constituents.

During separate interviews with Nana Bulumia-Twum Kwesi, an Assembly Member of Nkroful, Nana Addo Nredoh V, chief of Azulenloanu, who is a government appointee to the Nzema East District Assembly and Chairman of the District’s @50 planning Committee, Mr. John Quarm, Secretary to the Nkroful Traditional Council and Mr. Anthony Ackah, Secretary of the Nkroful Akwamu Youth Association, they all expressed disappointment at the way Mr. Blay had neglected Nkroful.

“In fact, our MP has totally failed and disappointed Dr. Nkrumah and we the people who voted for him,” the Nkroful Assembly Member said. To a suggestion that there are other towns in the constituency and that the MP could be performing elsewhere, he stressed that “You can’t say he has not done anything at Nkroful because it is not the only town in this constituency. He is in his third term in parliament and at least, something could have been done for this town, which is the hometown of his party’s founder.

“He actually has disappointed the party, he has failed the communities because if you have been in parliament for eleven good years and you have not been able to mobilize, at least, the youth to do something for themselves, then I don’t think you are the right person,” Nana Bulumia-Twum reiterated.

On his part the Chief of Azulenloanu said, “Our MP has been on the seat for three consecutive terms. He does not attend Assembly meetings.

The whole of last year, he didn’t attend a single Assembly meeting. He is only using the MP title he got from us to do his own thing.” Nana Nredoh told the paper that there was a Regional Council meeting recently to discuss matters relating to the death of and funeral arrangements for the late brother of the MP, Mr. Eddy Blay, a renowned boxer.

He disclosed that following the meeting, a 15-member delegation of which he is part had been asked to meet the MP to commiserate with him. He revealed that though he was a Member of the delegation, he initially decided not to take part in the visit to the MP because of the way he had neglected them, but he decided to embark on the trip in order to get the opportunity to meet the MP and make his frustrations known to him, face- to- face.

He advised that Mr. Blay should not attempt to contest for the position again since according to him, the people had come to the realisation that he had fooled them for long and they would only disgrace him if he decides to contest again in the 2008 parliamentary polls.

“He has done nothing for us and fooled us for long,” the chief said, adding, “There are other people who have the town at heart and can also represent us in Parliament.”

He said when the current District Assembly was being inaugurated about two months ago, the MP was not present with the excuse that he was busy.

“He says he is busy; busy for what? He had the ticket to be busy from us. The ticket that you have that you say you are busy and cannot attend meetings, you had it from us. The Regional Council voted me to the Assembly and I accepted so anything that is happening at the Assembly level, I can’t say since I have other committee meetings to attend I am busy and so would not attend. Sometimes, when my car breaks down, I have to hire a taxi and go and tell them what is happening at the district level,” he fumed.

He commended Mr. Kojo Armah, the CPP MP for Evalue-Gwira also in the Nzema East District, for what he said was his constant visits and for putting up an FM station in the locality which serves as a source of information dissemination and also employs a number of people from the area.

Nana was bitter about what he said was Mr. Blay’s failure to meet with the District Chief Executive (DCE), Mr. Joshua Kwajah-Ellimah ever since he (the DCE) was appointed some 14 months ago. He said it was unlikely for Mr. Blay to stand again unless he diverts to another party.

Mr. Quarm, the Secretary to the Traditional Council told the paper that he was not aware of any development project carried out in the town except for the provision of a number of chairs in a couple of schools. He was of the view that Nkroful being the birthplace of the founder of the party that sent him to Parliament he could have done something better there.

The Secretary of the Nkroful Akwamu Youth Association, Mr. Anthony Ackah, said the MP had fooled them for far too long.

“When they come and want your vote, they say we are Nkrumahist. After you vote for them and they win, you will never see them again. In fact, now people are wide awake,” the Secretary to the youth added.

The DCE for the area, who did not want to talk much when asked about what joint efforts he had made with the MP for Ellembelle to help develop the hometown of Dr. Nkrumah in the face of the 50th Independence Anniversary, only said, “It is always difficult to have access to the MP. Maybe it is because of his national assignments,” and was not prepared to talk further on issues related to the Ellembelle legislator.

MP defends himself The News editors of The Chronicle were the guests of the First Deputy Speaker from 11 a.m. till about half past noon on Thursday. The venue was his office in Ghana’s Parliament House and the agenda, to hear his response to the complaints from his constituents, particularly the people of Nkroful.

Hon. Blay did not hide from the reporters, his suspicion that the publisher of The Chronicle, Nana Kofi Coomson, was probably the brain behind two earlier publications of the paper that made startling revelations about the level of decay at the birthplace of his party’s founder.

After the reporters explained to him that the publisher had nothing to do with the stories and stressed that Nana Coomson, just like he (the MP) himself, also saw and read the stories only after they had been published, Mr. Blay expressed satisfaction with the explanation and then readied himself for what looked like an interrogation by the reporters.

He started his ‘defence’ by placing the people who had been mentioned in the two previous publications of the paper, into different camps of his political ‘enemies.’

First was Nana Bulumia-Twum, the Assemblyman for Nkroful. “Read the Graphic and you will find several articles written by this man consistently attacking me,” Hon. Blay fired his first defence.

He told the reporters that the Assemblyman had always opposed him and has been accusing him of not being a true CPP man. The MP said the Assemblyman had always been his political opponent and revealed that he personally worked against Nana Bulumia-Twum during the latter’s campaign to become Assemblyman, but could not succeed in his plans to make him lose.

The next to receive the Deputy Speaker’s verbal bullet was Nana Nredoh, the Chairman of the District @50 planning Committee and Chief of Azulenloanu. The experienced legislator started, “He wanted to become the regional Chairman of the NDC but he could not. I helped to get electricity to his town and he is saying I have not done anything?”

Just as the DCE had little to say on the MP, Mr. Blay also devoted less time on the DCE but nonetheless, did not spare him in his response: “I was against the nomination of the DCE because I knew he was not the best for the job,” he spiked Mr. Kwajah-Ellimah.

After the categorisation of his critics whose names were mentioned in the paper’s earlier publications, Hon. Blay then started to tell his own story about what he had done for the area.

He said he had done the best he could for the area but conceded that he had not done much at Nkroful. “I have renovated schools, built markets, a library and a host of other projects and sometimes I give physical cash to people,” he said and called the coordinator of his projects, Saed Yankey, on phone, to tell the reporters the things he had done in the area.

Mr. Saed, speaking thorough a telephone put on loud speaker from his base at Ellembelle, mentioned the various kinds of assistance and projects carried out by the MP, most of them being presentations of a quantity of bags of cement to communities. On what had been done at Nkroful, the coordinator said, the Methodist basic school had been renovated by the MP.

Asked about the lack of toilet facilities at Nkroful, he said he was prepared to help the community rehabilitate an old toilet facility- presumably the one built in 1964- but the people in the town insisted that they would want him to build a new one for them.

“The people said because I had built new toilets in certain communities, they also deserved a new one and not the renovation of an old one and I also felt it was better to renovate the old one. So that has been the situation about the Nkroful toilet problem,” he said and emphasised his admission that not much had been done in the town.

Hon. Blay, who said he was an NPP sympathiser, said he did not believe that the renovation of Nkrumah’s private property was the responsibility of anyone but the late leader’s family. He could not understand why the almost 100-year-old cousin of Dr. Nkrumah, Mr. Eduku Arizi, could be asking for scholarships. “Look at the old man asking for scholarships at that age,” he said.

The DCE and the Assembly Mr. Joshua Kwajah-Ellima is the District Chief Executive (DCE) of the Nzema East District. The news team caught up with him at his official residence at the District capital, Axim, home town of Pa Grant, the Gold Coast merchant, who single-handedly funded the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the first political movement in the country and paid Nkrumah’s fare to Ghana to assume Secretaryship of the party, to find out from him what the District had been doing and why Nkroful was in a state of neglect, especially in the face of the 50th independence anniversary.

He said he assumed office about fourteen months ago and maintained that he and his team at the Assembly were doing the best that they could to develop the area. He however complained that the Internally Generated Funds (IGF) of the Assembly was very minimal and thus constraining the Assembly when it came to development.

He said there were plans to develop Nkroful but emphasised that the lack of funds had been the major problem. “We have plans to put up three toilets at Nkroful as well as a jubilee school but the necessary funds have not been obtained for those projects to be carried out.”

He noted that he had discussed issues relating to the 50th independence anniversary with the Axim-born 63-year-old Kojo Armah, the MP for Evalue-Gwira, one of the two constituencies in the District but had not been able to do same with Hon. Blay because as he put it, “it is always difficult to get him.”

He disclosed that the District requires about ¢4billion to execute the numerous programmes that had been tabled to mark the country’s 50th independence anniversary.

The DCE disclosed that part of the plans for the 50th independence anniversary celebrations in the District was the building of a statue of Paa Grant in the centre of Axim. He said the children of Paa Grant had pledged to bear part of the cost.

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