…Charged To Produce “Further And Better Particulars” To GHC 2.7 Billion Procurement Savings
Over 20 civil society groups under the umbrella of Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019, petitioned the Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, to give details of his alleged saving of Ghana GHC 2.7 billion on procurement frauds in 2018.
This petition with copies available to Whatsup News is a direct response to the Minister’s recent 2019 mid-year budget review in Parliament announcing that that some GH¢ 2.75 billion had been saved by thwarting some unknown number of restrictive tender and sole-sourced government contracts.
But the civil society groups say they want the full list of contracts from which the savings were made. Their demands include a full name of the said contracts and their awarding government entities; the initial cost and revised costs; the beneficiary companies of these contracts and when the contracts were awarded.
The group is made up of heavyweights as IMANI Ghana, IEA, and Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), ISODEC, ACEP, CDD-Ghana, Ghana Integrity Initiative, IDEG, Send-Ghana, among several others.
“Given that the said savings of GHC 2.27 billion was allegedly attained through thorough scrutiny of contracts…it is imperative for these contracts to be made public to aid an appreciation of Government’s commitment to value for money and the protection of the public purse…,” the cover letter to the petition read.
The demands of the group was spurred by the massive number of procurement frauds that has recently been unearthed by undercover journalists, whistle-blowers and the Auditor-Generals Department.
Sulemana Braimah, who is the Executive Secretary of the Media Foundation for West Africa, one of the petitioners told Citi News that making such information public will be instructive to the public and provide guidance in future procurement applications.
Some of these procurement frauds have been linked to the Finance Ministry itself and the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) tasked as the regulator of procurement in Ghana.
Meanwhile, the discrepancies in the figures presented by Ken Ofori-Atta and a recent data released by the PPA may have raised the suspicion of the civil society groups.
In April 2019, the Public Procurement Authority announced that it had saved about GHC 1.9 billion in procurement expenses between April 2017 and December 2018.
“The biggest problem when it comes to corruption is in the area of public procurement and so if the government has consistently maintained that as a result of some prudent measures that were adopted, savings are being made to the tune of billions of cedis we think that it is important that the government makes the information open to the public so that we would all appreciate that the government is making towards ensuring value for money in procurement. If such information is put out, I guess all of us will learn from it and going forward be guided by what government is doing,” Sulemana Braimah the Executive Secretary of the Media Foundation for West Africa, one of the petitioners told Accra-based Citi News.