Kofi Bentil, Senior Vice-President of IMANI-Africa,has suggested that it is time Parliament legislates on funding and execution of projects in the country to end the spate of abandoned projects by successive governments.
He explained that legislature on funding and execution of projects would help to put an end to the problem and challenges of uncompleted projects which were at the cost of taxpayers.
“We can conceive the issues properly and actually find a way of where we are going to get money to fund abandoned projects, that way Parliament will refuse to fund any other project in the same vein, if abandoned projects have not been completed,” Mr Bentil said.
He observed that Parliament had the mandate to demand for certain issues to be reviewed and done without been spelt out in the 1992 Constitution so Parliament can use its powers to stop new projects though appropriation arrangement such as the Saglemi Housing Project and all those other issues on abandoned projects.
Mr Bentil blamed the uncompleted projects on the failure of the political elite, who were leading the citizenry into all kinds of promises which created problems and challenges saying “when they make the promises, IMANI for instance gets to assess them and in the number of cases the promises are patently bad.
“The Komenda Sugar Factory and other promises are so bad that the next government cannot continue, if anybody puts new money behind the factory it is more money wasted, in certain cases the promises are a knee-jerk reaction, E-blocks was knee-jerk reaction to New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) Free Senior High School.
“When we analyse the E-blocks at the time they were proposed, the numbers put out, I was at the programme and analysed the number of E-blocks that they had to build for that project to be completed before then President John Mahama, it was clearly impossible even if the country had all the money.
“Many leaders are driven by politics and fail to make the right analysis and make wild promises to citizens not factoring the scarce resources however, the president’s remark was poor and not well calibrated and it is not right for him to defend his response,” Mr Bentil noted. –myjoyonline.com
