A one-stop recreation facility, christened Rattray Park Kumasi City, was at the weekend jointly commissioned by President John Dramani Mahama and the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, in Kumasi.
The project, under a regenerated park, will provide a place of resort to enrich the lives of the residents of Kumasi by providing safe, affordable, welcoming parks and recreation facilities, and human service activities for people of all ages to play, learn, contemplate and be good stewards of the environment.
The vision is to provide affordable recreational, physical and cultural opportunities for residents, with a focus on families, youth development, and building healthy communities. Other features of the park include an artificial lake, a modern stage for live performances, and a wi-fi internet connectivity centre.
The 42,000 square-meter Rattray Park also has an acoustic dancing fountain; the first of its kind in Ghana. It also has a six square metres multimedia controlled fountain, children’s playground, a golf course, an open robust gym, and a cafeteria among others, and will provide wireless internet access, parking space, live matches and jazz nights.
The recreational park is named after Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray, who joined the Gold Coast Customs Service in 1906, and became the Assistant District Commissioner at Ejura in 1911, and is reported to be the first to land a helicopter on the park in the Ashanti Region.
R. S. Rattray, was an early Africanist and writer on Asante History.
He retired in 1930, and was killed eight years later while flying a glider.
The project, the brainchild of the Chief Executive of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA), Mr. Kojo Bonsu, was funded from KMA’s Internally Generated Fund, the District Development Fund (DDF) and Urban Development Grant (UDG), amounting to hundreds of thousands of Ghana cedis, with the aim of restoring Kumasi to its former glory as the Garden City, as well as generate revenue for the KMA’s development projects.
Commissioning it, President Mahama commended the KMA boss, Kojo Bonsu, for his efforts to bring change in which ever capacity he finds himself. He described the project as laudable and worth emulating by other mayors.
The President gave the assurance that the development of the region, and Kumasi particularly, is dear to his heart, and that the government will ensure that it re-lives the accolade as the “Garden City”. An 11-member Board of Trustees, headed by Lady Julia Osei Tutu, wife of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has been set up to see to the effective and efficient management of the recreational park, which is open to the general public.