Tamale places 9pm curfew on minors; parents of violators to face prosecution
The Tamale Metropolitan Assembly has imposed a curfew on children in the city from 9 pm to 6 am.
The curfew is geared toward protecting persons under 18 from the dangers of the streets, according to the assembly.
The Assembly is partnering with a Non-Governmental Organization, Neat Ghana, to execute this mandate.
The Tamale Metropolitan Chief Executive, Iddrisu Musah Superior, said the curfew which began on Tuesday, is essential to building a better city.
“You cannot have an educated healthy and prosperous society if you do not have a strategy to be able to build a society and in building the society, we have to build our children,” he told Citi News.
“It is amazing and totally unacceptable to find young children between the ages of say six and 15 roaming the streets of tamale unsupervised.”
He said the Assembly would now “assume that children who roam the streets of our cities after 9 pm are in danger.”
“…as the head of the city, I have the responsibility to remove them from danger, to provide them overnight support and to prepare them for school the next day.”
Parents of such children may also face prosecution.
“If your child is out there in the night roaming the streets of Tamale, we will remove the child from danger, we will keep the child in the safe place, but we will find out why you have done that. If there is demonstrable evidence that is child neglect, then I think that you should answer that in court,” Iddrisu Musah Superior said.
The assembly has said it is acting from Children’s Act 560 of 1998, section 16.
That section of the law says a “District Assembly shall protect the welfare and promote the rights of children within its area of authority and shall ensure that within the district, governmental agencies liaise with each other in matters concerning children.
It also says “the Social Welfare and Community Development Department of a District Assembly referred to in this Act as “the Department” shall investigate cases of contravention of children’s rights.”
Source: citinewsroom
