It’s time to legislate on funding, executing of projects – Kofi Bentil
Touching on the President’s response on the E-blocks project in the Volta Region, he said the President’s remark was poor and not well calibrated insisting it is not right for him to defend his response.
Senior Vice-President of IMANI-Africa Kofi Bentil says its time Parliament legislates on funding and execution of projects in the country.
According to him, this would help to put an end to the problem of uncompleted projects.
“We can conceive these things properly and actually find a way of where we are going to get the money to fund these project. That way Parliament would refuse to fund any other project in the same vein, if these projects have not been completed,” he said on Saturday.
Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile he said Parliament has the mandate to ask for certain things to be reviewed and done without been spelt out in the constitution.
“Parliament can use its powers to stop a new project though the appropriation arrangement and insist that an existing be done for instance Saglemi Housing Project and all those other things,” he told Sampson Lardy Anyenini.
He blamed the uncompleted projects in the country on the failure of the political elite, adding that “the politicians are leading us into all kinds of promises which create these problems.”
“When they make the promises, IMANI for instance gets to assess them and in the number of cases the promises are patently bad like Komenda and they are so bad that the next government cannot continue. If anybody puts new money behind Komenda its more money wasted.
“In certain cases that the promises are a knee jerk reaction. The E-blocks were a knee jerk reaction to NPPs Free SHS. When we analyse the E-blocks at the time that they were proposed, and the numbers put out, I was at the Joy FMs programme and analysed the number of E-blocks that they had to build for that project to be completed before Mr John Mahama… it was clearly imposissible even if we had all the money,” he stressed.
He added that many leaders are driven by politics and, therefore, fail to make the right analysis and make wild promises to citizens not factoring the scarce resources.
Touching on the President’s response on the E-blocks project in the Volta Region, he said the President’s remark was poor and not well calibrated insisting it is not right for him to defend his response.