The flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama, has debunked assertions that guinea fowls under the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) flew to Burkina Faso during his tenure as president in 2014.
It would be recalled that the management of SADA in 2014 made headlines when information broke that some guinea fowls under the initiative migrated to neighbouring Burkina Faso.
During a media engagement in Bolgatanga to wrap up his tour of the Upper East Region, the former President said the allegations levelled against him were not true.
Mahama explained that, unlike the popular belief that the rearing of the birds was to be concentrated in an enclosed area, it was actually an incubation process where the day-old chicks were then to be distributed to farmers for onward rearing.
He blamed the media for the wide publication without the necessary checks to understand the project properly.
“No guinea fowl flew to Burkina Faso. Guinea fowls are not migratory birds and the project was not for you to come and see thousands of guinea fowls in one place. It was supposed to incubate the eggs and give the guinea fowls’ day-old chicks to farmers.
“And so somebody came and asked the watchman, ‘where are the guinea fowls? And the watchman said, they go Burkina Faso, they go come back in the rainy season.’ The media went and published it. And after that, there are people who believe that there were some guinea fowls that flew to Burkina Faso. So that project died. But I think it is a project we can look at again.”
The former president added that there was an elaborate plan where the mature guinea fowls were to be processed in a plant and transported to market centres across the country.
“There was supposed to be a processing plant so that the guinea fowls would be bought off the households and processed. And they would put them in frozen trucks to send them down to the south to the market. Unfortunately, the project ran into issues. The media criticised it, and they came and said the guinea fowls had flown to Burkina Faso.”