Accra, Jan. 26, GNA – His Eminence Peter Cardinal Appiah Turkson, Chairman of the National Peace Council (NPC), on Friday called on the Government to expedite action on the inauguration of the Council to ensure its legal authority and real autonomy. He made the call prior to the cancellation of ceremony, where the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Country Office was supposed to have presented a 33,000 dollars and Land Cruiser to the Council. The ceremony was cancelled due communication hitches. The Council, set up by the Ministry of The Interior (MOI) in collaboration with the UNDP Country Office as an autonomous advisory body, is to assist the Government to engage parties in conflicts in dialogue towards peace. Cardinal Turkson noted that the situation created the erroneous impression that the Council was merely a Government Department, whose judgement and actions could be influenced by the ruling party. “We want all stakeholders to have confidence in the Council and to trust that they could approach the Council and have issues addressed fairly and in a non-partisan fashion,” he said. He was of the view that to ensure public confidence in the Council and to make it approachable by all stakeholders, there was the need for the Council to be moved to neutral grounds and to hold its meetings in its own offices where all could feel free to come. The 11-member Council include eminent religious leaders, chiefs and private people of high repute, selected through broad based consultation processes with all stakeholders including political parties; chiefs; youth and women groups. Its mandate, as captured under the Country Programme Action Plan (CPAC), is specifically to monitor conflicts and advise the Government and its partners on how to mediate; deepen dialogue between conflicting parties and also to provide a policy framework within which to deal with conflict situations. The Council had been replicated at the regional and district levels with the Regional Peace Advisory Councils (RPAC) and District Peace Advisory Councils (DPAC), which were to be housed by the Regional Administrations and District Assemblies. Even though NPC was captured in the 2007 Budget Statement for the provision of funds to establish a new office and to pass a parliamentary act to legally establish it this year, it had been functioning on the support of UNDP. UNDP was currently working with the Government to facilitate the recruitment of a research officer; a programmes officer and a secretarial staff to handle the day-to-day administrative needs of the Council.
Source: GhanaWeb
