President Akufo-Addo has hinted that work on the Multipurpose Pwalugu Dam project in the Talensi District in the Upper East Region, is expected to end and the project commissioned by 2025.
According to the president, the preparation works that started in 2020 is expected to end by June 2021 to pave way for the actual construction work to start from July 2021.
President Akufo-Addo gave the assurance on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address in his second term in office.
If the construction start as the president has assured, it will clear the doubts and also confine critics who claim at any given opportunity that the government does not have the resource required for that huge project.
President Akufo-Addo said the construction of the Multipurpose Pwalugu Dam project will help to mitigate the regular flooding that occurs in the White Volta basin and mostly cover farmlands and settlements in parts of the Upper East and North East Regions.
For years, parts of the Upper East and North East Regions have experienced annual flooding as a result of continuous downpours and spillage of excess water from the Bagre Dam in Burkina-Faso. Many lives have been lost and crops as well as other properties destroyed by floods over these years.
“It is the single largest investment in the northern part of Ghana made by any government. Once completed, it will add sixty megawatts (60MW) of hydropower and fifty megawatts (50MW) of solar power to the national grid, thereby improving the quality of power supply in the northern part of Ghana.
The 25,000-hectare irrigation scheme will be bigger than the total size of all irrigated projects implemented in the country since independence, and will boost food production in the northern part of Ghana, thereby boosting economic development in northern Ghana and creating jobs for the youth.”
In November 2019, President Akufo-Addo cut the sod for the project in the Talensi District and it is expected to cost the government of Ghana an amount of 993 million dollars.
The project is being executed by Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned hydropower engineering, and construction company.
At that sod-cutting event President Akufo-Addo said among other benefits, the Multipurpose Dam when completed and in operation will reduce the cost of power distribution to the northern regions of Ghana, while industrialization, modern commercial agriculture and value chain activities, as well as the general socio-economic environment, would be given a push.
He estimated then that, about 2,200 skilled and unskilled Ghanaians are expected to get jobs when the construction works start.
Source: a1radioonline.com|101.1MHZ|Ghana
