Politics of Wednesday, 26 August 2020

Source: mynewsgh.com

Identification of errors in tracker proves govt is transparent - Bawumia

Vice President of Ghana, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia Vice President of Ghana, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia

The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has said that errors identified in the government’s website developed to track projects and initiatives embarked upon by the government means their goal of ensuring transparency has been achieved.

According to him, the tracker has two legs which comprises of the New Patriotic Party’s(NPP’s))promises and infrastructure which includes what the government has done and is currently doing across the various Districts in the country.

The Vice President who was speaking on Accra-based Peace FM indicated that this will give Ghanaians the opportunity to verify for themselves the state of projects being done by the government.

“This is the benefit of the transparency we have introduced. Now if you say we have done this here, the public will say it’s not there. If the MCE says it’s here, they will say it’s not there. So the Kanda Borehole people pointed out that it seems to have been abandoned so we checked with the Municipality and they are saying yes they did dig the borehole but they found that the water was bad so they decided to cap it and not continue but I think in their entries they did not recognise it as an abandoned project but those are very easy to amend. As we put this website together, many many districts are coming and saying that we have this project that you didn’t capture since we launched it,” he stated.

"When the host then suggested that there could be other projects on the website that should not have been there, the Vice President said “I will not argue that”, adding that “we have a bridge at Mankraho kyiraa and that should have come under Tano North Municipal but in the entry it was missed so you will have those sorts of issues because although it exists, it was captured in another district. But that’s what I’m saying about the transparency in the system we have produced. If it doesn’t exist, we will know and then we will take steps to make sure it’s properly entered”.

Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia noted that “identifying 26 as ghost projects out of more than seventeen thousand projects…infact today if you go to the website because other projects have been added to the website because Districts are saying we have this project we have 18,075 but if that’s the case and you say 26 have problems and we’re going to interrogate that 2. That means you’re saying that 99.9% of what you’ve done is correct if you can only find 26 that are not correct. If those stand to scrutiny. 99.9%now that is massive in terms of what you’ve been able to do for this country. We should not rubbish things just for Political expediency. This is the only country in Ghana that has brought this to increase the transparency and accountability in government”.