PARENTS, CHILDREN MUST HAVE MUTUAL RELATIONS (PAGE 35, OCT 7, 2010)

THE South Dayi District Chief Executive (DCE), Mr Kafui Bekui, has advocated sound and mutual relationships between aged parents and their children in order to ward off the imaginary attitude of irresponsibility towards aged parents in the communities.
He said some aged parents ridiculed and cursed their children for non-remittances because the children were regarded as the parents’ front-line caretakers who had failed, adding that, that situation led to the collapse of the extended family system.
Mr Bekui said the youth should rather be motivated to make them less suspicious of the aged and be made more responsible.
The DCE was addressing a rally of the aged drawn from six communities in the South Dayi and Hohoe districts in the Volta Region in connection with the celebration of the United Nations Day of older persons.
The event was under the auspices of HelpAge Ghana.
Mr Bekui pledged the support of the district assembly in considering the grievances of the aged to enhance their living standards.
The Volta Regional Co-ordinator of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, Ms Emelia Menorkpor, said the programme was being implemented in the Ho and Keta municipalities, the Jasikan, Krachi East, Ketu South, Nkwanta North, Nkwanta South, North Tongu and South Tongu districts.
She said it would be expanded to cover communities in the South Dayi District and urged the aged not to despair but encourage the younger ones to prepare for their old age, which was inevitable unless one died before then.
The Volta Regional Co-ordinator of the Older Citizens Project Management Committee, Madam Agnes Broni, said HelpAge Ghana had helped in training 24 paralegals to deal with legal issues in the communities.
She also said 180 older people had been trained to monitor the health and pension issues of their fellow older people in six communities under a campaign code-named “Action demands action” which operated across many different countries.
Madam Broni said the campaign had the vision of bringing older people together to decide on issues that were most pressing to them as a group.
A representative of the Hohoe Municipal Chief Executive, Mr Cosmos Yeboah, said old people were misconstrued as being witches and wizards, stressing that the youth who labelled the aged as such could equally be labelled as descendants of those witches and wizards.