Mr Gerard Ataogye, the District Chief Executive (DCE) for the Kassena- Nankana West District in the Upper East Region has called for proper maintenance culture to ensure that furniture provided to schools are kept in good condition.

He observed that schools within the District were saddled with several broken pieces of furniture which were left at the mercy of the weather, and called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) and school authorities to “gather all broken ones (school desks) at vantage points where we can work on them.”

The DCE said schools had been supplied with furniture over the years, but because of poor maintenance culture, the phenomenon of lack of furniture, especially in basic schools kept recurring. “If you have the desks, they break and you do not maintain them, you are going back to square one.

The media in its quest to expose schools without furniture and children laying on their bellies to learn, should equally cast its lenses on the pieces of broken furniture dotted around some schools owing to the lack of maintenance culture by some school authorities, he said.

Mr Ataogye who made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Paga stressed that “if the desk is broken, try to fix it, we ought to do a lot of things for ourselves.”

He said through the one-million-dollar facility, the District had earlier supplied 800 dual desks to schools, 25 beds for the Children’s ward of the District hospital, and was in the process to procure 500 additional desks to be supplied to schools to improve on quality of teaching and learning.

“Actually, the deficit of furniture in the schools is about 1,600. It is not a day’s job. We know the needs so we are supplying,”.

He said citizens should not sit and expect government to solve all their problems, and urged them to do the little they could, to help themselves and their communities. “You do not sit and ask government to come and pick pieces of polythene bags and sachet rubbers around your house.”

He said with the slightest rainfall, pieces of polythene bags and sachet rubbers often chocked gutters, and created fertile grounds for mosquitoes which infected the same people with malaria. “We can easily decongest our hospitals indirectly by obeying all rules and regulations governing sanitation.”

Mr Ataogye noted that even though there were challenges in the District, some of the challenges were artificially created by citizens which could be solved.

He said there was ongoing road construction work to link Paga to Kayoro. “The grading is being done, there are some rivers that needs bridges, in fact when the work is done, it would be a short route to the west (Chiana).

He called on the media not to concentrate only on the negatives in society, but endeavour to report more on the positives to project the image of the country to the world. “The Western world also have negative stories, but do we see that all the time.”

“We are doing our best, His Excellency President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is leaving no stone unturned to make sure that Ghana stands on its feet and to make sure that Ghana beyond aid works”.