The commencement of the exhibition of the provisional voters register and the refusal of treatment by about 46,000 people living with HIV are some of the trending stories in the Ghanaian press on Friday.
The Graphic reports that the processes to get credible voters register for the December 7, 2020 elections enter the crescendo today with the commencement of the exhibition of the provisional register.
The eight-day exercise is being carried out in all the 33,367 polling stations and will present an opportunity for registered voters to correct their records, make inclusions and table objections to ineligible persons on the voters roll.
It is the final stage of the process to clean up the register.
The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs. Jean Mensa, said it had deployed 73,107 officials across the exhibition centres to ensure a successful exercise.
Speaking at the ‘Let the Citizens Know’ series in Accra yesterday, she said the officials the EC had deployed were made up of exhibition supervisors, deputy exhibition supervisors, verification officers, as well as COVID-19 ambassadors, whose role would be to help enforce the COVID-19 safety protocols.
The newspaper says that about 46,000 people living with HIV have refused treatment, the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC) has revealed.
According to the Director-General of the commission, Mr. Kyeremeh Atuahene, the development had presented a challenge to the national HIV epidemic control and viral suppression programme.
Speaking during a courtesy call on the Managing Director (MD) of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr. Ato Afful, in Accra last Wednesday, Mr. Atuahene said the situation was one of the major difficulties the commission was facing in its bid to prevent the national prevalence of 342,307 from going up.
He said what was equally disturbing was that the situation had rather resulted in new infections.
The courtesy call on the GCGL MD was to enable the commission to solicit the support of the country’s biggest media organisation to boost the delivery of the advocacy for behavioural change and also strengthen existing relations between the two institutions.
The Graphic also reports that Vice-President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has underscored the need for Ghana and China to explore new areas of cooperation beyond the existing relationship between them.
According to him, such a move would ensure that they tapped into the economic opportunities in both countries and also help Ghana replicate the success story of China.
He said this at a virtual symposium to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Ghana-China diplomatic relations.
Dr. Bawumia said the depth of relationship that had existed between the two countries since July 1960 had become more robust and diverse, especially in the areas of trade, investment, culture, and international relations.
He added that the two countries continued to cooperate at the multilateral level and were working together to ensure a just, equitable and peaceful international order.
The Times says that the founder IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has stressed the need for Ghana to digitise all land records to eliminate challenges affecting land registration system in the country.
“Lands hold the value for building any country’s worth” for which reason Ghana needed a system that could properly identify land records to aid commerce,” he said.
He was speaking at a forum in Accra on Wednesday to address the challenges confronting land registration in the country, stressing that digitisation could be achieved by fast-moving the documentation of land owners in a well-organised but less costly manner.
The forum was to see to the initiation of several reforms in the registration and ownership of lands and ensure a better record keeping system for land registration.
While noting that the registration of lands should not be expensive, Mr. Cudjoe said that the registration of lands should not make the country lose its ability to be an attractive place to do business.
The newspaper reports that the European Union has threatened to stop buying cocoa from Ghana if the continuous destruction of the country’s forest reserves through illegal mining and prospecting for minerals are not stopped.
“The illegal prospecting for minerals is destroying the environment and forest cover and those involved must take a serious look at the matter,” the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of COCOBOD, Mr. Joseph Boahen Aidoo, disclosed this during a courtesy call on the Western Regional House of Chiefs in Sekondi.
Ghana could lose the European market in the cocoa industry if the destruction of the forest reserves did not stop.
He said the EU was worried that the destruction of the forest reserves due to these illegal activities was contributing to climate change.
The COCOBOD boss accompanied by his top management team were at the regional house to brief them on the activities of COCOBOD, especially debts paid by his outfit since assuming office and cocoa roads being tackled all over the country.
GIK/APA