Former President John Jerry Rawlings has called on Ghanaians to embrace family planning to control population explosion.
He pointed out that the means to have safe sex was always available and that people should explore it in order not to burden society with children they could not take care of.
The former President who was addressing a political rally last Saturday at the Mandela Park in Ashaiman as part of the 25th-anniversary celebration said one of the things that undermined Ghana’s development was the lack of serious family planning.
“No matter what we do or how hard we work, if we do not do something about family planning, it will keep undermining our attempt to develop. You can see it right in your homes, your ability or capacity to feed your children, clothe them and pay their school fees, etc. so it is, this kind of situation is transmitted into the community, society and nation. Let’s think about it” “When I see children all over the place, the way they sweat it out in the streets, trying to sell, just so they can survive, it is so difficult. Every Friday, I have to look for money so that when I am passing by, I can give to them for the weekend,” he said.
Embrace Family Planning
He, therefore, called on Ghanaians to embrace family planning as a way of controlling the rapid population growth with its attendant impact on national development.
Rapid population growth has also been identified as having negative impacts on overstretched health systems and other resources and amenities.
The use of family planning methods is said to have a number of benefits, including reducing maternal and neonatal mortality,as well as unsafe abortion which contributes to 20 per cent of all maternal deaths and positive socio-economic benefits to the family and community.
Family planning does not only deal with pregnancy prevention or delay, but it also includes support for people living with infertility by providing them with counselling and methods to assist them achieve pregnancy.
Bush burning
The former President also bemoaned the recent incidence of bush fires leading to the burning of electric poles.
He recounted a recent newspaper article in The Ghanaian Times about some electric poles that got burnt through bush fires and advised municipal and district assemblies to form volunteer groups to weed around tension poles in their communities in an effort to curb the burning of electric poles.
“Telephone your people in the various parts of the country to be a little more responsible and take responsibility for these poles. During our era, assembly people were constituted into gangs to regularly weed the little bush and bushels around the teak poles in order to prevent the poles from catching fire. This is not an NPP, NDC matter. This is electricity which we all need,” he said.