The former National Democratic Congress (NDC) government started development of the Saglemi Affordable Housing project at Prampram in the Greater Accra Region’s Ningo Prampram District in 2012.
The facility was supposed to be a 5000-unit apartment facility to help with the country’s housing shortage.
It has one to three-bedroom apartments for low-income earners on a 300-acre plot of property.
The first phase of the $200 million project included the building of 180 blocks of over 1,500 apartments.
After receiving parliamentary approval on October 13, 2012, the then Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing, led by Collins Dauda, signed an Engineering Procurement and Construction Agreement with Messers Constructora OAS Ghana Limited on January 4, 2013.
Following years of abandonment, the proposal became a source of contention shortly after the New Patriotic Party (NPP) came to power.
Former Housing Minister Samuel Atta Akyea clarified that the agreement was botched because of past NDC government officials’ embezzlement.
The project’s halt, he said, was due to an investigation into claims of procurement violations following a value for money audit that revealed the country had been short-changed.
In several occasions, he stated that disciplinary action had been taken against those authorities in order to recover funds that had been misappropriated by the state.
In 2017, it was revealed that the Ministry of Works and Housing had reviewed the “Second Amended and Restated Agreement” and signed the “Third Amended and Restated EPC Agreement” without authority, resulting in a contract price drop of US$181,081,000.00.
Letter to AG for termination
Samuel Atta Akyea wrote to the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General’s Department in November 2018 seeking counsel on the contract’s potential termination due to the state’s impending financial loss.
The Department replied on May 8, 2018, via Gloria Akuffo, its former director, and concluded that “since the arrangement expired in June 2017, there can be no termination of a non-existent agreement as demanded by the Ministry.”
Key contract documents were incomplete or had anomalies, according to studies.
The government suspected that funds had been misappropriated in the scheme, resulting in shoddy construction.
Collins Dauda, a former Works and Housing Minister, was accused by Mr. Atta Akyea of changing the initial deal for the Saglemi housing project without going to Parliament.
He said that after Parliament approved the deal in October 2012 for the building of 5,000 housing units, the then-minister revised the deal, reducing the number of units to around 1,500, and then to 1,024 following another review in 2016.
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Commitment to complete project
The government has been chastised for failing to operationalize housing units that were constructed in 2016.
However, Francis Asenso-Boakye, the new Minister of Works and Housing, has stated that the government is committed to completing the housing programme.
Before the government sets a completion date for the plant, he added, developers and engineers will be brought in.
While the Saglemi housing project is a positive concept, the design and execution were performed incorrectly, according to the Minister.
Audit validation
According to the Minister, his outfit is also validating an investigation report on the contract prepared by the Ghana Institution of Surveyors.
Architectural and Engineering Services Limited, a ministry department, is doing the validation, according to Francis Asenso-Boakye.
The former sector minister, Mr. Atta Kyea, commissioned a report from the Ghana Institution of Surveyors, which expressed reservations regarding the decision to reduce the number of housing units from 5,000 to 1,502.
It also made several accusations of misconduct, which are now being investigated by the police.
The exercise commissioned by Mr. Asenso-Boakye, on the other hand, aims to confirm the problems posed in the first study, including the $32 million needed to finish the project.
In announcing the confirmation exercise, Mr. Asenso-Boakye stated that the Attorney General had requested that the matter be forwarded to the Criminal Investigations Department of Police for further investigation.
SOURCE: ATLFMONLINE
