More illegal structures in the capital are to be pulled down by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly on Thursday and the rest of the weekend under a decongestion exercise.

The AMA on Wednesday night deployed more than 400 personnel to the central business district, the Kwame Nkrumah Circle and the Kaneshie footbridge area to pull down all unauthorized structures and evict hawkers who had retuned to the streets after similar exercises earlier on.

The AMA said it will also extend the exercise to destroy structures which serve as haven for prostitutes and criminals.

On Thursday morning, the Central Business District and the Kwame Nkrumah Circle were rid of hawkers, and while guards of the AMA ensured free movement of people and vehicles at the Hawkers’ Market area at Circle, some hawkers would not give up without a fight.

According to Joy News’ Alex Kobina Mensah who witnessed the exercise, some traders at the Kaneshie market were threatening to demonstrate against the city authorities. Others concentrated on rebuilding their broken stalls.

The assembly’s task force supported by the police, began destroying illegal structures in the central business district of Accra around 11 p.m. on Wednesday night.

The exercise is to allow free movement of people and vehicles and to get the capital ready for CAN 2008 which starts in January. Curious onlookers and traders spilled onto the streets to watch as their properties were destroyed.

Some traders hurriedly cleared off their goods as soon as officials of AMA arrived with bulldozers and workmen.

Questions have been raised about the sustainability of the exercise. But officials of the assembly said they were determined to permanently clear the capital’s streets of hawkers and illegal structures.

Special aid to the Mayor, Ali Baba Abature said the AMA had positioned over thousand men and women at vantage points to ensure that hawkers did not return to the streets.

“We are going to ensure that these people are maintained constantly from 5am to 1pm then another batch will take over from 1pm to 7pm. We have instructed these people not to assault anybody, not to tamper with anybody’s goods but to arrest these people found selling the goods but to bring them to the police station for prosecution.”

The decongestion exercise is the fourth to be organized by the AMA in three years. One of the affected traders whose kiosk was pulled down around the Makola Market area described the operation as a haphazard approach to decongesting the city.

He claimed that the exercise was not sustainable since in times past, the AMA’s officials turned round to collect money from the ejected hawkers or those whose goods were seized only to allow them to return to the same place to continue their business.

Again they are also made to pay taxes from their income generating activities and wondered what was the justification for the exercise.

The AMA’s Ali Baba Abature told Joy News’ Alex Kobina Mensah that all structures underneath high tension polls would also be affected. The AMA intends to extend the exercise to residential areas such as East Legon, Jorwulu, Cantonments and Airport Residential.