The presidential candidate of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama, has refuted claims that guinea fowl under the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) flew to Burkina Faso when he was the president in 2014.
Mahama said this during a media engagement in Bolgatanga as part of his tour of the Upper East Region.
The former president said the allegations levelled against him were not true.
Several news portals and media firms reported the story of some guinea fowls migrating to neighbouring Burkina Faso under the SADA initiative.
However, Mr. Mahama says the reported stories were fake news and accused the media of failing to investigate the matter before reporting on it.
“No guinea fowl flew to Burkina Faso. Guinea fowls are not migratory birds and the project was not for you to come and see thousands of guinea fowls in one place. It was supposed to incubate the eggs and give the guinea fowls’ day-old chicks to farmers.
“And so somebody came and asked the watchman, ‘where are the guinea fowls? And the watchman said, they go Burkina Faso, they go come back in the rainy season.’ The media went and published it. And after that, there are people who believe that there were some guinea fowl that flew to Burkina Faso. So that project died. But I think it is a project we can look at again”.
“There was supposed to be a processing plant so that the guinea fowls would be bought off the households and processed. And they would put them in frozen trucks to send them down to the south to the market. Unfortunately, the project ran into issues. The media criticised it, and they came and said the guinea fowls had flown to Burkina Faso”.
