Ranking Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Interior James Agalga has called on Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to as a matter of urgency, apologise to Ghanaians over comments the latter made on Tuesday, November 2 about the 10,000 CCTV cameras.
According to the Builsa North Legislator, the statement made by the Vice President at the ‘Transforming An Economy Through Digitalisation: The Ghana Story’ lecture at the Ashesi University with regard to the number of CCTV cameras that have been installed across the country is disingenuous. He stated that the 10,000 CCTV cameras as stated by the Vice President mention is contradictory to the actual figure which is 6,500 as reported to Parliament by the National Security Minister Albert Kan-Dapaah, hence the Vice President must apologize to Ghanaians for misinforming the public.
It will be recalled that the Minister for National Security appeared before Parliament to respond to a question by Member of Parliament (MP) for Wa West Mr. Peter Lanchene Toobu on the state of the CCTV installation project. Mr. Kan-Dapaah is quoted as saying, “to date, installation works of 6,500 cameras have been completed, with a little over 4,000 cameras powered and online, mainly in Accra, Kumasi and other regional capitals, and this has aided us to achieve many successes in detecting many infractions and criminal activities, including helping us solve recent violent crimes such as armed robbery and killings.”
For this reason, MP Builsa North asked the Vice President to apologise. “On Tuesday when the Minister for National security [Albert Kan-Dapaah] appear before Parliament he indicated that, so far 6,500 CCTV cameras out of the 10,000 had been deployed and they will be continuing and by the end of the year they would have done the deployment of the 10,000. So when Dr. Bawmia goes out there, to say we have deployed 10,000 cameras he misled the Ghanaian People and he must render an apology to the good citizens of Ghana” he said
Mr. Agalga who was the deputy Minister for Interior in the John Mahama administration noted that the CCTV cameras project started in the Mahama administation. He said they completed the first phase of the project adding that the NPP government is only continuing with the second phase of the project. The MP suggested that the current government cannot take credit for the initiative.
“Before the NDC left office the phase, one of the contracts, called Alpha Project was already launched and executed. So the command centre and monitoring area can be found behind the Accra International Conference Center and that particular project was commissioned by President Mahama along with the deployment of 1,000 CCTV cameras across the country. So the point I am making is that what the NPP came to do was simply to launch the phase two of the project because the contract was in two phases” He noted.
Checks by A1news also indicate that the President, speaking at the graduation ceremony of the 50th Cadet Officers’ Course, at the Police Training Academy on October 1, 2021 also spoke issue of the installation of the 10,000 CCTV cameras.
The president said “at the beginning of my mandate, in 2017, there were eight hundred (800) CCTV installations in the country for surveillance. At the end of my first term, the figure had gone up to six thousand, five hundred (6,500), and, by the end of the year, another three thousand, five hundred (3,500) would have been added, making a total of almost eleven thousand (11,000) in the country”.
Source:A1Radioonline.Com|101.1MHZ|David Azure| Ghana|
