Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Minister, Hannah Tetteh, has restated she has no ambition to contest for presidency on the ticket of the National Democratic Congress, NDC.
The Awutu Senya West MP was however not definite on whether or not she has ambitions to be a Vice President as has been rumored.
Responding to that rumor in an interview with Kwesi Pratt, Host of Hot Issues on TV3, Madam Tetteh said a vice presidential position cannot be desired or targeted since it was solely the prerogative of a presidential candidate to appoint.
It is not clear from which quarters the rumor about Madam Hannah Tetteh’s perceived ambition started, but the rumor resurfaced recently following an incident between her and former President Jerry John Rawlings, founder of the NDC.
Mr. Rawlings while speaking at a recent conference of international city mayors in Accra, descended heavily on Madam Hannah Tetteh calling her disrespectful.
According to Mr. Rawlings, the foreign Minister who was billed to deliver the President’s speech at that conference but was asked to hand over that duty to the Vice President Kwesi Amissah Arthur, rudely left the venue without recourse to protocol.
The Minister has since clarified the matter saying she left the scene to attend a cabinet meeting and did not think it was necessary to inform everyone before leaving.
The rumormongers say the underpinning factor for madam Hannah Tetteh’s supposed disrespectful act as alleged by Mr. Rawlings, is because she is eyeing the position of the Vice President.
The rumormongers further alleged there had been a few incidents between the Vice President and Madam Hannah Tetteh which gave impetus to the claim that she was interested in becoming the Vice President.
But madam Hannah Tetteh told Kwesi Pratt Jnr. on Hot Issues she is not interested in the number one position of the land. She also added it was not possible to eye a vice presidential job since that responsibility was the sole prerogative of a presidential candidate.
In responding to a question about whether she did not have ambitions for higher positions aside being and MP and a minister she said “I don’t and I have said this several times. At the end of the day what is the higher position? It’s either a President or Vice President. I don’t ever want to contest for President and the choice of a vice presidential candidate is the prerogative of a presidential candidate and not something that you desire to do on your own. And I think that having had the chance to serve as a Minister is a very high position. It comes with a lot of responsibilities and I am happy to have had the opportunity and privilege to be a minister” she said.
Madam Hannah Tetteh said despite her busy schedules as Foreign Affairs Minister, she still deems it fit to be a parliamentarian, explaining her decision to contest the Awutu Senya West constituency again.
“I am certainly going to contest in the parliamentary primaries in the Awutu Senya West constituency. When I win the primaries then I will go on to contest the 2016 elections. I am busy as a foreign Minister but I contest in Awutu Senya West because that’s where I come from. My late father introduced me to this idea of contesting for parliament because he felt that once you’ve had the opportunity of education and the benefit of exposure , you should try and give back to your community. And I think that for a politician, it is very important that no matter how busy you are, to maintain contact with the grassroots, and I think that being an MP is the best way to do that”.
“This is because people come to you from all sections of the society whether they are from your party or not; but once you have to engage with them continuously you have a real idea of the issues people have to deal with in their daily lives. The tendency is that once you are in a very high position of being a minister, you can have a certain amount of distance and detachment if you don’t have that anchor and for me that’s what being the MP for Awutu Senya West does for me and that’s why I want to contest again”.
The government has put in place measures to stop this year’s cholera outbreak from escalating into an epidemic, Mr Kweku Quansah, a Programme Officer of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate (EHSD), has said.
Mr Quansah said one of the steps that had been taken was collaboration among various stakeholders, since cholera prevention and control had suffered a lot of fragmentation. An inter-ministerial committee on cholera has been put together to push the regional and district stakeholders to take action and had so far made some consolidated plans to stop the spread of cholera this year, he added.
Mr Quansah said the activities to tackle cholera were centred on education, law enforcement and infrastructural development and the various stakeholders were using information vans to sensitise people, while cholera treatment centres were being set up to deal with any outbreaks.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic at a cholera sensitisation and training workshop for 20 selected journalists from various media houses in Accra last Thursday, he gave an assurance that “we are rolling out a lot of activities to make sure we bring the cases to the barest minimum this year.”
Ninety per cent of the cases reported this year were in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), while the Volta and Central regions also reported a number of cases.
Conservative figures from Dr Emmanuel K. Dzotsi, the Public Health Specialist at the Disease Surveillance Department of the Ghana Health Service put the current figure at 601 cases and five deaths from 31 districts in eight regions across the country, with a case fatality rate of 0.8 per cent.
Mr Quansah cautioned that although Ghana was doing better this year as compared to last year, the country was not yet out of the woods because the rains had just set in. He said many interventions had been put in place to forestall an epidemic of the proportion of last year’s outbreak.
In 2014, Ghana experienced its severest cholera epidemic in three decades, which registered 28,975 cases with 243 deaths from 130 out of the 216 districts in all 10 regions. The outbreak carried over to 2015 contributing to the current number of reported cases in the country.
Mr Quansah said most of the activities to stem the tide on cholera are focused on Accra, since each year Accra was the starting point of a cholera outbreak. “Once we are able to stop cholera from spreading even within Accra, half of the battle would be won,” he stated.
The two-day training and sensitisation workshop was to educate the selected journalists on causes, prevention and effect of cholera. As part of the training, the journalists went on a field trip to open defecation prone sites in Accra and some cholera endemic communities.
