The Owoo family in Accra has voiced dissatisfaction with the ongoing public debate about the supposed declassification of Accra’s Achimota Forest.
They claim they have been victims of “severe historical injustice.”
The family stated in a statement issued by the family’s chief elders on Thursday that they have not yet taken possession of any land in the Achimota Forest.
Despite their engagements with several regimes in the fourth republic, they maintained this is on time.
“The pre-acquisition owners of all the land purchased for the Achimota School in 1921 and 1927, the Owoo Family, have experienced great historical injustice.”
“In the past, the family has had to accept and/or submit to terms that it strongly believes were unfair and unjust in order to go on.”
“The much-discussed August 19, 2016 event, which has been incorrectly reported in the media as the moment when the land was released to the Owoo family, is untrue and deceptive,” the family declared.
“That occasion was a sod-cutting ceremony for the development of the Achimota Forest into an Eco-Tourism park,” a family representative said. The Owoos were only invited as guests.”
The Owoo family stated that “it has always maintained that no compensation has been made for the 1927 acquisition,” as highlighted in parts of the statement.
“The acreage due the Owoo family was arrived at through a long-standing negotiation that in many ways precedes the current administration,” the family noted. Various State technical negotiators and agencies were actively involved in this process.
“In the fourth republican administration, the Owoo family has petitioned all governments and has yet to obtain possession of any parcel of land.”
The Owoo family’s concerns arose in response to recent talks about the Achimota Forest, which followed the distribution of an eight-page paper that was widely shared on social media.
The document claimed that the Achimota Forest Reserve’s status had been lifted to allow for prospective redevelopment for other reasons.
According to the Owoo family, it initially refrained from commenting on the topic, but was forced to do so owing to public misrepresentations.
After giving their side of the story, they promised to act in a way that “would not jeopardize the ecological integrity of the adjacent forest reserve.”
They also urged the general public to ignore any false contributions to the ongoing public debates.
Source: adomonline.com
Content created and supplied by: BassTV (via Opera
News )