<<Print>>

Twenty-four property owners whose illegal structures were demolished at the Kasoa old market site on February 28, 2006 have appealed to the government to pay them compensation for the demolition of their structures. They said although their facilities around the old market and were not part of the structures of recalcitrant traders earmarked for demolition, they were pulled down. �In fact our properties were not part of the old market .Some of the structures were not market structures, they were houses with people living in them,� Mr Haroun Tetteh, the spokesperson of the land owners said during an interaction with journalists at Kasoa in the Central Region. Attempts All attempts, he said to get the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, the Central Regional Coordinating Council and the then Awutu Efutu Senya District Assembly to stop the demolition of their structures were ignored. The property owners, he said, saw the action of the then government as an affront to justice since their structures were not part of the structures of recalcitrant traders who returned to the old site a year after they were moved to the new market to pave the way for the construction of the road. Traders Mr Tetteh said 3,500 traders at the time were moved to the new market site on the Bawjiase Road before the demolition of illegal structures at the old site. �We thought innocent property owners were going to be compensated by the then government in 2006 but nothing was heard from it in spite of demands by the victims,� he said, adding that the present government ( the National Democratic Congress) put a committee in place from the Urban Roads Department �with the promise that all those who were affected by that exercise were going to be compensated�. Committee The committee, he said, of which he was part, worked to ensure that innocent property owners were compensated. �As we speak now, nothing has been done after more than 10 years ,� Mr Tetteh said. He said property owners thought that with the construction of the interchange about to begin , their compensation would be integrated into the project but they had received no notification to that effect.