Features
Abandoned projects: Ghana’s monument to neglect (Part 1)
Monuments of all types abound in Ghana. We have the slave castles, forts, national parks, and all kinds of important relics that remind us of our history, arts, culture, and other aspects of our national life. Good stuff. Besides, they earn us some money.
I refer here to monuments like the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, the slave castles and forts, the Kakum National Park with its canopy walkway which is one of just three such eco-tourism attractions in Africa, our beach resorts, waterfalls, and many more, not leaving out the recently refurbished Ghana National Museum in Accra.
But these are not my concern in this article. I am thinking about another kind of monument which has earned Ghana as much notoriety as those listed above have earned us fame. The monuments I have in mind evoke a sense of anger, disappointment, and even shame. Collectively, I designate them as a monument to neglect.
These include infrastructural projects that have been abandoned mid-construction, left in ruins, at the mercy of the elements, and begging for attention. They have become white elephants, so to speak.
They come in all shapes and forms – construction projects including housing schemes, educational and health facilities, factories, sports amenities, roads, and highways. Very lofty and laudable projects one may say.
They are announced with pomp and pageantry. Chiefs of the project areas and other dignitaries, including ambassadors of sponsoring countries grace the occasion, and political speeches are made about who is doing better than who.
The date of completion is boldly announced, expectations are raised, and work begins in earnest. But before long, the projects are abandoned midway through construction. For what purpose are they started at all? To tickle our fancy? If they are more trouble than they are worth, why start them in the first place?
I still do not get it. I do not know why we sign contracts for specific projects, sink substantial sums of money into them only to leave them to go waste without any scruples. Why? How could we be so cruel as to dissipate funds we borrow for such projects in such wanton manner?
If it were your own money, would you waste it like that? Even the prodigal son who wasted his share of his father’s estate, realised his mistake, and picked up the pieces. Not so with Ghana. From Nkrumah’s time, any change of Ghana has led to abandonment of on-going projects. Even incumbents abandon their own projects.
Upon reflection, I think I know the reason. It is a deadly combination of criminal negligence, apathy, ignorance, and insensitivity on the part of the managers of our scarce resources conspired to turn otherwise valuable and enviable projects into useless structures.
We do not get any use from them, neither can we siphon our investment and direct it to other profitable ventures. Our money is just squandered and that is it. No qualms about that. Really? Yes, if anyone cared, heads would have rolled all this while to serve as a deterrent to the callous perpetrators of such nefarious crimes against the state. Saboteurs! That is what they are.
Needless to say, projects that are started and never completed, devour a huge chunk of our scarce national resources. Some analysts believe that such abandoned projects consume as much as a tenth of Ghana’s capital expenditure and then are left to go to waste.
Other experts are not so charitable. They reckon that abandoned projects account for as much as a fourth, or even a third of Ghana’s capital outlay, only to reap losses because any potential gain evaporates into thin air due to the uselessness of the enterprise.
Whatever the percentage, one thing is without controversy. We are losing scarce resources and we do not seem to have any clear strategy to stop the drain. Some examples of such dissipative expenditure on abandoned projects will serve to place the magnitude of this fiscal waste in the right perspective.
The multi-million-dollar Saglemi Affordable Housing Project at Prampram, initiated by the previous administration of the NDC now in opposition, readily comes to mind.
The project sits on a 300-acre land and comprises a 5,000-unit residential facility to accommodate middle and low-income earners within Accra and its enviros and reduce the housing deficit in the metropolis.
When the NDC left office in 2016, the first phase of the project which consisted of 180 blocks with 1,500 residential units, had been completed at the cost of $200 million.
But due to allegations of financial impropriety in procurement and inconsistencies in contract documents handed over by the previous administration, the ruling NPP led government has left the contract in abeyance.
Besides, no allocation of the completed flats has been made, and the people for whom the project was undertaken, are the worse for it.
In fact, a recent documentary on the project depicted a sad story of deterioration of parts of the project. Glass windows and other amenities like fixtures in the kitchens and bathrooms had been damaged and the lawn overgrown.
Greatness has been showered on us by Providence, but we do not seem to believe in ourselves. We have been endowed with everything it takes to be among the greatest nations on the planet. Dr. Nkrumah proved it with gigantic infrastructural projects to put Ghana up among the stars.
That gave Ghana the confidence to boast about being unprecedented leaders in so many fields. After him, we have continued to lead the way, but we are only trailblazing in reverse. Nkrumah’s slogan: “Forward ever, backward never,” has been turned on its head.
The American author and publisher, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, says:“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do…Explore, Dream, Discover.”
Ziad K. Abdelnour, a Lebanese-American investment banker, financier, author, and activist famously said: “Words are useless without action. Stop fantasising and just DO it. Be a game changer or get played like an idiot.” In other words, deeds, not words.
The empty platitudes and political rhetoric must give way to concrete programmes to produce positive change for Ghanaians to reach the sky where they really belong, where eagles tread.
To reach the mountain top is a long and arduous journey. But how we climb the mountain is more important than reaching the top. It will take time but if we plan well, we would not start a project without much reflection and abandon it at great cost to the nation.
Thirty-eight-year-old successful American entrepreneur, Ryan Allis who started his own digital company, Allis Computing at age 11, shows us the way, if only we would be humble enough to borrow a leaf from his proven principles.
He says: “Have the end in mind and every day make sure you’re working towards it.”
To be continued.
Contact: teepeejubilee@yahoo.co.uk
By Tony Prempeh
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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