Investigative Journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni, with The Fourth Estate, has opened up on how he felt when he first learnt about the Bongo scandal.
Mr. Awuni has over the years broken several stories of alleged corruptions in Ghana with the most recent being what he termed as “The Bongo scandal”.
In his investigative report, Mr. Awuni established that the Bongo District Assembly allegedly awarded a contract to itself using the certificates of a company without the owner’s permission, among other allegations of illegal transactions involving some management members of the assembly, other notable individuals as well as the Maltaaba Community Bank in Bongo.
The contract was to dig and install boreholes for selected communities in the district.
Speaking on A1 Radio’s Daybreak Upper East program on Thursday, September 2, 2021, Mr. Awuni said his findings “sounded unbelievable. I have done a number of weird stories that people are involved in shady procurement deals. But this sounded strange to me that the assembly could award a contract to itself using somebody’s company without the person’s permission and eventually paying monies into that person’s account and going to the bank to withdraw monies from somebody’s account without the person’s presence or authorisation.”
“It appears there is some level of conflict of interest. Because if the people awarding the contract are also taking part in the contract, then the procurement process has been undermined if you look at how things went. Granted that even if they say that the contract was not awarded to them, the question will now be- What interest do they have to personally go to the bank to withdraw the money and if this is what is happening, is it also possible that this contracted would have been awarded at a cheaper cost is the procurement process was competitive.” He added.
Mr. Awuni who hails from the Bongo District continued that “For a bank that is supposed to be trusted by the general public; how will you sit down for somebody to come and take money from another person’s account without the person’s permission. All of these are matters of good governance- both at the assembly level and also cooperate governance on the part of the bank that people may need to look into. And going into the future, whoever occupies the seat as the DCE; not only of Bongo but any other part of the country and knowing how deprived the people are, they should be interested in allowing due process to happen- allowing transparency to go on so that we will get value for money. Because we are already very deprived and so if we get the money, we should be interested in using the money to the benefit of the people we serve.”
Meanwhile the investigative report has sparked mixed reactions from people of the Upper East Region, particularly those from the Bongo District.
Source: A1Radioonline.com|101.1 MHz|Ghana
