The Chamber for Local Governance (ChaLoG) has bemoaned the unpreparedness of Municipal and Metropolitan District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) within the COVID-19 epicentres to designate appropriate accommodation facilities to house itinerant load carriers or kayayei prior to the 2-week lockdown by the government.

As part of measures to prevent further spread of the deadly virus, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo announced further restrictions of movement within the Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions and Kasoa effective 1 am on Monday, 30 March 2020.

In his fourth address to the nation on the virus, Mr Akufo-Addo urged residents living in the affected areas to comply with the lockdown.

However, essential services have been exempted from the lockdown.

Some persons, in order to avoid the movement restrictions, travelled to their hometowns.

But scores of kayayei who attempted doing so were intercepted by security officials at Ejisu on Monday just when the lockdown had taken effect. They were sent back to Accra where the Metropolitan Assembly has been taking care of them.

In a statement by ChaLoG on Wednesday, 1 April 2020, the group said it had “noted with grave concern the unacceptable and unprofessional conduct of the Hon. Municipal Chief Executive of the Ejisu District Assembly in returning thirty (30) head porters who were headed to the Northern Region to escape the harsh realities of a two-week lockdown on their welfare and living conditions.

“ChaLoG is completely at a loss why government appointees (especially MMDCEs) who know or ought to have known truly well the obvious insanitary conditions that many of these head porters live in on a daily basis and yet, besides the mere promises made by the government to these head porters, nothing concrete has been done to appropriately accommodate this category of people living and working mainly in the Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions.

According to ChaLoG, “The unacceptable and unprofessional conduct of the Ejisu Chief Executive simply portrayed how unready the Metropolitan/Municipal/District Assemblies (MMDAs) within the epicentres of the COVID-19 were prior to the lockdown. MMDCEs, as heads of their respective security councils, should have known that some people were necessarily going to make the attempt to travel outside of the lockdown areas to their hometowns to avert the harsh realities of the 2-week lockdown as many of them simply live from hand to mouth on a daily basis if they do not venture out to do any work or render service for a daily income.”

It continued that it “expected the MMDCEs in the affected MMDAs to have collaborated and shared intelligence and readied themselves for such scenarios to appropriately deal with it, as and when it does happen. If these were to be done by the affected MMDAs that were locked down, their respective security councils would have prepared and designated public facilities and churches to temporarily hold these head porters and other people to be immediately tested for COVID-19 rather than just unacceptably asking them to move back to Accra where they were expected to be coming from.

ChaLoG, therefore, called on the “MMDA Security Councils of the 260 District Assemblies to, as a matter of urgency, share intelligence among themselves to help stem the community-to-community spread of COVID-19 in the country”.