One-third of local government projects uncompleted – research

It has emerged that about one-third of Ghana’s local government infrastructure have been left to rot with no hope of whether or not the projects will see the light of day. The office of the Local Government has no data whatsoever on what projects had been started, where it had gotten to and what plans were for completion, the project titled “Ghana’s Infrastructure – The mystery of misspending” established. “You know, there must be some data in these annual performance reports that the local government puts together. You should go talk to this person at the National Development Planning Commission to talk more about it,” head of Civil Service, Nana Agyekum-Dwamena reportedly told the researcher when contacted for information. The situation propelled the researcher, Martin Williams to visit the offices of the National Development Planning Commission after which he visited over 100 sites across 6 districts with some officials of the NDPC. Projects on the over 100 sites visited were left uncompleted leaving projects that had started for as long as a decade ago to rot with no indication of finishing these projects. The cost of the unfinished projects is about 20% of Local Government’s spending budget per year. This 20% constitutes over 25 million a year, an amount which is enough to build about 700 additional schools every year that equates to about 70, 000 additional children  that could be getting education in school buildings. Findings also indicated that projects that are not completed after the first two years has the chance of not being completed at all. “Some of them have been uncompleted for over 4, 5 and 10 years,” Deputy Director of the NDPC, Jonathan Azasoo noted. Comparing the amount of money that had been allocated for the projects and the amount of money that had been paid on them, it turned out that contractors had done more work than what they were paid for. This indicated a shortfall of monies allocated for the project with no trace of where those monies were. The research also brought to bear the fact that a lot of projects were started before elections and immediately after elections, these projects were left uncompleted. “It is a political problem, all get started at a go,” the research captured. By 3news.com| Ghana]]>