AMA Goes Into Action, But Commits Error

The ordinary Ghanaian’s perception of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) as a non-performing and jittery institution was brought to the fore when the driver of a bulldozer, detailed to demolish 300 houses at Camp Two, Teshie, Accra, ended up dropping the load carrier onto a resident’s foot, culminating in the amputation of the victim’s four toes.

Eyewitness told the “Chronicle” that on June 21, this year, around 3:30pm, the victim, 30-year-old Andrew Mawuli Chapman, alias Foyoo, who resides at Camp Two with his auntie, Doris Ziorkley, a civil servant, heard an unusual noise behind the walls of their three-bedroom flat.

Mawuli rushed out of the house only to find a bulldozer rumbling down the wall. Confused and desperate, he jumped over another side of the wall to plead with the driver to hold on till he could call his auntie or neighbours to help him remove their belongings before the demolition of the house.

The Chronicle learnt that Madam Ziorkley had already been notified by an AMA letter on January 15, 2002, asking her to submit her building plan and permit for examination. The notice, signed by a nameless AMA official also demanded that the lady pull down the house, which the AMA claimed had been constructed along a waterway.

Three hundred houses along the waterway were supposed to have been affected by the demolition exercise, according to an AMA source, but the Chronicle established by press time that only two houses went down, minus even that belonging to the victim’s auntie. “It wasn’t an accident,” one angry resident told his reporter. “He intentionally dropped the metal basket onto the boy’s foot. It cannot be an accident.”

The claim of residents received credence when the Chronicle independently established that after the boy had been wounded, the AMA Task Force, including weapon-carrying policemen, ignored the victim and went their way. AMA Goes Into Action, But Commits Error The ordinary Ghanaian’s perception of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) as a non-performing and jittery institution was brought to the fore when the driver of a bulldozer, detailed to demolish 300 houses at Camp Two, Teshie, Accra, ended up dropping the load carrier onto a resident’s foot, culminating in the amputation of the victim’s four toes.

Eyewitness told the “Chronicle” that on June 21, this year, around 3:30pm, the victim, 30-year-old Andrew Mawuli Chapman, alias Foyoo, who resides at Camp Two with his auntie, Doris Ziorkley, a civil servant, heard an unusual noise behind the walls of their three-bedroom flat.

Mawuli rushed out of the house only to find a bulldozer rumbling down the wall. Confused and desperate, he jumped over another side of the wall to plead with the driver to hold on till he could call his auntie or neighbours to help him remove their belongings before the demolition of the house.

The Chronicle learnt that Madam Ziorkley had already been notified by an AMA letter on January 15, 2002, asking her to submit her building plan and permit for examination. The notice, signed by a nameless AMA official also demanded that the lady pull down the house, which the AMA claimed had been constructed along a waterway.

Three hundred houses along the waterway were supposed to have been affected by the demolition exercise, according to an AMA source, but the Chronicle established by press time that only two houses went down, minus even that belonging to the victim’s auntie. “It wasn’t an accident,” one angry resident told his reporter. “He intentionally dropped the metal basket onto the boy’s foot. It cannot be an accident.”

The claim of residents received credence when the Chronicle independently established that after the boy had been wounded, the AMA Task Force, including weapon-carrying policemen, ignored the victim and went their way.

Mawuli, a graduate of Valley View University, Accra, is currently under treatment at the 37 Military Hospital where efforts to stitch up the four toes failed, as the bones had been terribly broken. In frustration, the concerned medical officers could do nothing but amputate all four toes.

The victim was sporting a heavily bandaged foot when the Chronicle stole into the ward last Saturday evening. Madam Ziorkley was number 99 on the list of residents whose houses were to be razed to the ground.

Four years ago, a similar exercise that was to have affected some 50 houses at La, Accra, ended abruptly after a hardworking Presbyterian woman’s restaurant (Mawuli Restaurant) was partlly razed to the ground, leaving a hulk of a blockwork to the testimony of the AMA’s selective justice and unprincipled way of doing things.