Rex Asanga, the MCE for Bolgatanga, in the Upper East Region has admitted the lack of clarity and straightforwardness that surrounds the institutional toilets being built within the Municipality.
Speaking on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East, Mr. Asanga again admitted that for most of the projects that have been abandoned in the various communities, it is almost impossible to trace the contractors and the source of the contract, saying “we are at a loss, we do not know so much about it”.
This situation, may be due to the fact that while some of the institutional toilets were built through the Northern Development Authority under the Auspices of the Special Development Initiative, others began through the Ghana First Projects.
It could be recalled that in 2018, Ghana First Company Limited (GhFCL), a waste management firm owned by Mr Frank Akulley, with his German partners signed a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) agreement with the Government of Ghana through the Local Government Ministry and the Sanitation Ministry to construct 20,000 units of modern automated toilet facilities across all Metropolitan, Municipal and Districts in the country at the cost of $300,000,000. In lieu of that, the company that same year awarded the first batch of 2000 toilet facilities to contractors for a working duration of three months.
The MCE said, “we have not been able to clear information about them [the institutional toilets]. What I am getting is that it is a Public-Private initiative and the person who was awarded the contracts has absconded. The people who invested in those toilets have not had any payments”.
“One of them that is at the market, where we relocated the traders. We happened to stumble on the contractor who is working on it and we decided to initiate discussions with him to see what agreement the Assembly can come with him so that we put it [the toilet] to use”.
“We are in the process of trying to identify the other contractors on the other toilets so that we can start discussions. Of course, we need some legal advice also because about the contractors, we did not give the projects to them so we cannot just go and see the contractor and take over,” he continued to say.
Meanwhile, residents in some beneficiary communities of the Ghana First Toilets project in the Bolgatanga Municipality have resorted to defecating in the uncompleted abandoned structures.
They say they find it difficult to do the deed in the open as their old toilets’ structures were pulled down for the construction of the new ultramodern Ghana First toilets. Residents thus resort to the uncompleted ones.
A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
