Indiscriminate Blocking Of Access Roads In Ho Alarming

In every town across Ghana, access roads are so important in the daily routine of motorists both private and commercial for easy and quick movement or goods and services from one point to the other.
Well that is not the case in the Volta Regional capital Ho. It has become very alarming and popular in every corner of the Ho Municipality to see funerals being held on roads that must have been busy during the day or evening or at rush hours especially from Thursdays to Fridays.
Observation carried out specifically in the Ho municipality indicates that a lot more people prefer to use productive access roads as funeral grounds instead of patronizing the spacious parks and durbar grounds in the municipality.
Every Friday it is common to see that every Friday almost ever y access road had been blocked just because of the funeral of a dead body which has just been released from the mortuary after a months or even years of preparations.
Giant speakers are mounted on both sides of the roads with tents and arranged plastic chairs.
One such instance was a funeral I witness on the Afede road t in Ho. The Afede road serves as an access route to motorists coming from the Ziavi Mountain, Ola SHS and those motorists who want to take the cut-short form from the Ho market through to the main Afede road in other to join the main Ho – Accra road.
As early as Thursday evening around 3:39 the Afede road was blocked by funeral organizers to make way for road to be used as funeral durbar ground.
The Ho – Accra highway is a very important one which road linking Northern Volta with the South.
Many other roads in the Ho municipality suffer one or two blockades.
According to source we spoke to on condition of anonymity, they said that sometime this happens because it may be a funeral of an Asafo from the Asafo Company, a chief or a very important son of daughter of Ho.
The source said normally they do ask for permissions before they blocked any road though others do it without permissions from the Municipal Assembly.
Another source also said that as tradition requires most lands where roads were constructed on belongs to the certain peoples. So they block it when they need it.
This trend is not just common to the Volta Region alone but the entire country.
We asked for how long will this continue, are roads no more important for development anymore, your guess is as good as mine.
The appropriate authorities must act now.

By: Murtala Mohammed Bako, Ho
Email: murtalabako1995@yahoo.com
0249314858