Ghana is currently burgeoning with a lot of infrastructure activities, but it does not have the corresponding capacity to effectively handle the development process, Rockson Dogbegah, Chairman of the BUSAC Built Environment Steering Committee, has indicated.

He disclosed this at a sensitization workshop for Built Environment professionals in Accra as part of plans to ensure the promulgation of a law that will regulate the industry.

He said: “We need a deliberate policy that leads to growing and developing the sector. This will expose the industry to the current best practices.”

According to him, the Ghanaian construction industry was facing numerous challenges.

Issues about the non-performance of local construction firms, he stated, were crucial because of the absence of institutions and a deliberate policy to train and develop the capacity of local contractors.

“There’s the need to establish Industry Development Board, which will ensure that the construction industry receives the needed attention. We are advocating government and stakeholders attend to the industry.

“This accounts for the use of foreign companies all the time during huge projects.”

Mr Dogbegah said the Procurement Act needed further amendment to tackle issues of sustainability and the implementation.

He expressed concern about the activities of public practitioners, who do not respect provisions that encourage the local content.

“We have in the Act that some jobs that are tendered under the National Competitive Bidding must be limited to nationals. However, you have public procurement practitioners ignoring some of these. So we must do something about implementation and pursue an effective sanctioning regime to ensure that if the practitioners ignore these, they are sanctioned.”

Noting that there was no effective monitoring mechanism of projects that were executed by both government and the private sector, Mr Dogbegah said the district assemblies do not have the capacity to do that.

“Their function is enormous and huge. We need an agency, which shall be referred to as the construction industry development agency or board to regulate the construction industry so that role becomes solely the responsibility of the agency. That way we will have a local construction base that is able to compete effectively with foreign contractors.”

“Now contractors do not have specialty. They scramble for almost all manner of jobs at different places of the country even though they don’t have the capacity to deliver.”