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SADA made mistakes – Former CEO admits

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Former CEO for the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) and current Executive Director of the International Development Economists Association (IDEA) Charles Abugre has admitted that SADA made mistakes in pursuing its mandate as a vehicle for developing Northern Ghana.

He said while SADA chalked very positive feats, the Authority made mistakes that caught the attention of many. He said at the time he took over as CEO of the Authority, it was basically on its knees.

“Nothing is more fulfilling than taking a task that seems hopeless and doing something out of it. SADA at the time, the nature of our politics, had basically turned the entity into something of a sort of a pariah and something hopeless. For the two years or so that I was there, we did demonstrate that it was possible to turn a public institution around,” he said.

“It [SADA] made mistakes just like any institution, public or private, makes mistakes. In the first two years of its establishment, it embarked on projects too big for its capabilities. It was established in 2011, 2012, it was already delivering a lot of projects but it did not have a technical team in place. The second thing is that just like we witnessed today also, there was too much political interference at that time so it was seen too much as an NDC project. Because the first CEO was a former minister of government, anything that went wrong was seen with a political eye,” he explained.

He recounted that the first audit of the organisation found a lot of procedural problems with regard to procurement and accountability. Mr. Abugre maintained that while the Authority made mistakes it “also initiated some really cutting edge programmes, some of which have remained today that people do not speak about. In fact, their largest project at that time was input subsidies for seeds and fertilizers.

He was speaking on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East in Bolgatanga today, December 22, 2021.

The Former CEO added that another project that was undertaken by the CEO with support from private investment was the Yagaba Irrigation Development Project. He said the irrigation project which is currently run by the Integrated Water and Agriculture Development (IWAD) Ghana remains one of the positive legacies of SADA.

“I inherited all of these; the good and the bad. The good is hardly known, the bad is exciting for politics,” he stressed.

On the tree planting project, Mr. Abugre indicated that a million trees were planted by the Authority with independent corroboration from the University for Development Studies. 85 percent of the trees survived after the first year. He said after the termination of the arrangement, those who were engaged to care for the trees in the dry season by the then President, a good number of the trees died.

Meanwhile, Mr. Abugre speaking on the same platform clarified long-standing thoughts that the Authority reportedly indicated that guinea fowls reared under one of its projects by the Asongtaba Cottage Industry in Sumbrugu in the Upper East Region had flown to neighbouring Burkina Faso.

He said the statement was made by a journalist and not SADA adding that the fueling of the misinformation was borne out of mischief.

A1Radioonline.com|101.1MHz| Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana

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