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-To Be Completed In December 2020
The Minority members of Parliament from the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has taken on the Akufo Addo government for deliberately delaying the operations of the ultramodern University of Ghana Medical Centre.
The US217million hospital which will be mostly used for referral cases have been under lock and key for close to three years after it was virtually completed and stocked with equipment
Head of Customer Relations, Barabara Owusu-Hemeng, told journalists in Accra this week that the hospital will be fully operational by November 2020. However, the opposition NDC under whose administration the hospital was built, is highly skeptical about this new timeline given by the customer relations executive.
The NDC believes the NPP administration is merely playing a political game with the facility because it would not want it to be attributed to its predecessors.
The Akufo Addo government says it has released some US$50million to expand the medical facility, but the NDC MPs who visited the facility this week, were disappointment at the neglect of the facility by the Akufo Addo government.
Many of the machines ready for use to save patients struggling for space at chocked referral hospitals, hence the opposition wonder why the government wants to wait to “scale up” the hospital before it makes it operational.
The MPs who also visited the Bank of Ghana Hospital, were denied access by security men at post who confirmed the facility has been virtually abandoned for about three years by the Akufo Addo administration, despite that hospital being ready for operation at the time the previous, the administration was leaving office.
Ranking Member of Parliament’s Select Committee on Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh was particularly angry at the waste of resources which he attributes to “parochial political interest” of the NPP. Apparently, the NPP is uncomfortable to operationalize those facilities because they were constructed by the previous NDC administration.
“Let’s begin to punish the NPP for what they are doing wrong; when I’m standing by, I will learn something by it, that tomorrow when I get the opportunity to come, I must not repeat the same mistake because the people of this country will punish me” he urged.
Meanwhile the University of Ghana Medical Centre’s head of customer relations pleaded patience saying, “We are going to scale up significantly by November 1st, as I said, 2020 December is when we are expecting to finish the entire project as it is phased. But come November 1st we are going to have way more than you see now.”
The ultramodern project has been delayed in the past three years by controversy over whether the place is to be controlled by the government or the University and the delays have meant that it has not been accessible to patients.
After the project had come to a standstill, the government released US$50million to the contractor to continue works on its second phase.
Ms. Barbara Owusu-Hemeng however pointed out that the place was going to be a referral center and not a primary medical care center and would therefore only receive
Government Misses GHC 57.7 billion revenue target
The Akufo Addo administration is set to meet its revenue target of GHC 57.7 billion for 2019, the Ministry of Finance has revealed.
The government was unable to meet its target for the first quarter of this year mobilizing a little over GH¢10 billion which is about GH¢2 billion short of its GH¢12 billion target for the first three months of 2019.
In an interview with Accra-based Citi Business News, Deputy Finance Minister, Kwaku Kwarteng revealed revenue mobilization is below target but was hopeful government’s expansionary policies including the introduction of the benchmark value will rake in the needed revenue.
“The Revenue targets we put into the 2019 budget statements were quite ambitious and it is because of the additional measures, we rolled out in 2019. We have been looking to get a return on those revenue measures and the broad strategies regarding revenue mobilization,” Mr. Kwateng said.
“Now it looks like our targets have not been achieved so far, but that does not surprise us. At the end of the first quarter of 2019, we did deploy the benchmark policy,” he noted.
Critics have jabbed the government for setting unrealistic targets.