By Philip Tengzu
Babile, (UW/R), Jan. 03, GNA – The Chiefs and people of Babile in the Lawra Municipality have held their maiden Home Coming event with a call for unity and peaceful co-existence among the people in the community to help ensure rapid development.
The event was characterized by a football competition among the six sections within the community to help bring the people, particularly the youth, together to engender unity and development.
As part of the celebration, the community also commenced an initiative to construct washrooms at the Babile Polyclinic to help improve access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services by patients visiting the facility.
Addressing scores of people in Babile to climax the celebration, Naa Saapiur Dakuar III, the Chief of Babile, explained that the success of the celebration symbolised the readiness of the young people to come together as a family to contribute their quota for the community’s development.
“What I have witnessed here today is a symbol of unity. It shows that we are children of one mother. It is very important to uphold it because it will help develop the community”, he said.
Naa Dakuar, who opened the football finals with a kick, encouraged the sections that lost in the football games to see it as a form of entertainment and not to allow it to generate hatred.
The Chief also advised the young people against engaging in any form of social vice as that could affect their academic endeavours, mar their holistic development, and hamper the development of the needed human resources for the community’s advancement.
“I want to urge our parents and guardians to take a serious interest in the welfare of the children. We should ensure that before we as parents go to bed, the children are already sleeping”, Naa Dakuar said.
Mr Alex Yirikye, the Assembly Member of the Babile Electoral Area, observed that the Home Coming initiative would help bridge the occurrence of such uprisings in the community that could impede the development.
“From the start of the football games to the end, there was nothing like this person is a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Traditionalist.
If we continue to come together like this it will help us a lot by preventing fighting among us like what is happening in other areas in the country where women and children are currently suffering,” he explained.
He also urged the members of the community to report any strange people cited in their areas to the community leaders including the security agencies to help prevent the infiltration of violent extremists in the community considering the occurrences of such activities in neighbouring Burkina Faso.
On his part, Mr Gregory T. Tengzu, the Bipola Naa (Youth Chief) of the community, urged the youth not to give up on their contributions towards community initiatives despite the challenges they may encounter in their daily endeavours.
He commended the individuals, groups, and organisations for their diverse contributions to making the event a success and expressed hope that the lessons learned from the maiden edition would feed into subsequent editions to make them better.
All the teams that participated in the football games were given undisclosed amounts of money as appreciation for their contribution to making the event a success.
GNA