At a time when the Fisheries Minister is entreating people who consumed dead fishes that washed ashore the Osu Castle Beach late last week to report themselves for monitoring, some of the consumers who harvested and ate the fish have been speaking to the media.

A number of them spoke to Accra-based Citi TV confessing that they had actually taken some of the fish and prepared meals with it.

According to one of the women, even though she hadn’t experienced anything like that ever before, the fact that the incident happened on Good Friday (April 2), for her [it] was like a blessing from God that free fish are washed ashore.

“I haven’t experienced such a thing before but since it was on a Good Friday, I said God had blessed us, free fish had arrived on our shores.

“So when people were collecting it, it was being retrieved on the premise that tests were to be conducted on them but we haven’t heard anything of these tests,” she said.

She also narrated to what use she put the fish after harvesting and the aftermath when people started sounding caution on consumption.

“Yes, the fish was nice. I used it to eat some small fufu, I also spiced it very well and ate. Nothing is going to happen. But some people came talking about poison, poison so I got scared. But now if anyone does, I tell them, ‘here I am, if it is about poison, am I dead?’ So the fish was nice,” she stressed.

A number of state agencies have reacted to the incident from the level of the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture to the Fisheries Commission, the Food and Drugs Authority, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, amongst others.

The sector Minister Mavis Hawa Koomson was in Osu on Tuesday (April 6) together with the Information Minister to meet fisherfolk and to ask them to co-operate with authorities to identify the cause of the phenomenon.