OVER EIGHTEEN buildings earmarked for demolition by the Volta River Authority due to nearness to high voltage tension pylons over twelve years ago are still sitting under the Volta River Authority high tension pylons at Nkawkaw and its environs in the Kwawu East Municipal Assembly of the Eastern region.
Most of the houses affected were paid various sums of money to relocate because of the emissions of the high voltage overhead cables which can cause diseases such as leukemia, asthma, cancer among others.
Occupants of those houses have returned with the consent of the landlords who are renting the apartments out, while the authorities look unconcerned for over twelve years.
Though the Electricity Company of Ghana was informed to disconnect all the houses affected, that has not yielded any results.
According to Agya Kwasi Omari, a landlord of Asuogya, a suburb of Nkawkaw, who spoke to the DAILY HERITAGE, all the landlords whose houses were earmarked for demolition were paid reasonable sums of money to relocate, but only a few of them were demolished by then, leaving the majority of the buildings.
Some of the landlords were able to convince the authorities who had come for the demolition exercise to give them ample time to remove their building materials.
Despite the landlords being paid off, they were accorded a human face on humanitarian grounds and just after the bulldozers and excavators drove off from the environment, the landlords began renting out their houses to new tenants.
Information gathered by the paper indicated that some of the abandoned houses are being occupied by criminals who harass the residents of Asuogya at night.
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