A cornered Akufo Addo administration has been forced to explain itself over allegations of faux pas dams it claimed to have constructed for farmers in the Northern part of the country.
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) had ruffled the government’s feathers by driving to the location of some of the alleged completed dams, only to find dry and baked up patches of earth in place of water.
Shortly after the NDC’s stunt, the Hawa Koomson-headed Ministry of Special Development Initiative quickly released a statement on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, seeking to debunk the NDC’s exposé, saying the Nakpachie and the Adibo dams in the Yendi Constituency were not part of the completed dams.
However, the statement quickly noted that there is the possibility of some of the dams drying up. “…as we are in the month of March, which is the tail end of the dry season in the north, it is expected that there will be heavy use of the harvested water for farming, livestock watering, and other domestic activities. Hence, the water levels across many of the dams will generally decrease until the next raining season,”
The One Village One Dam initiative is one of the flagship policies of the Akufo Addo administration to help improve agriculture in Northern Ghana which is mostly dependent on rain-fed irrigation.
The government claims it is currently constructing 300 dugouts out of 560 dams at an average cost of GHC 250,000, however, some critics and the opposition NDC insist the Akufo Addo administration is deceiving the public about the true state of these dams.
The NDC is convinced that the dams are mere “Trojan Horses” designed solely to convince the population in the North to vote for the NPP in the coming elections.
Criticisms about these dams have been ongoing for over a year now, forcing the government to hint at publishing a list of the completed dams. Till date, a complete list with pictorials evidence has not been released by the government, in what is further fuelling speculations of deception.