Akufo Addo Gov’t Promises New “Saglemi” Housing As Old One Rots Away

The Akufo Addo administration is promising to construct some 100,000 to 250,000 housing units every year. Yet the government has abandoned some 5,000 units built by the previous government at Saglemi, close to Tema.

The Minister of Works and Housing over the weekend made this suspicious claim, saying the government intends to use that projection to plug the 2 million housing deficit in Ghana. This is despite the fact that almost all the governments in the Fourth Republic who promised public housing had woefully failed to deliver.

Industry experts have wondered why, despite, the unrealistic promises, subsequent governments continue to make similar promises. 

According to Prempeh, the Akufo Addo government intends to construct between 100,000 to 250,000 housing units every year to provide affordable residential accommodation for public and civil servants.

To address the country’s two million housing deficit, the Minister explained that the government had decentralised the affordable housing scheme to Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies across the country.

Currently, the Akufo Addo administration has abandoned a project for some 5000 housing units at Saglemi for the past five years because it was started by the previous administration of John Dramani Mahama.

The Akufo Addo government justified its rejection of the partly finished housing estate, saying the contract awarded for the project was fraught in corruption. 

However, the government has been unable to prosecute a single person involved in the alleged corruption.

Meanwhile, more than 700 public housing units constructed by former President John Agyekum Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have also been abandoned since 2006. In 2020, the former Minister of Works and Housing Samuel Atta-Akyea claimed the Akufo Addo administration will complete those abandoned houses by 2020. 

To date, not a single move had been made towards that and therefore, a promise to construct a new public housing scheme has been regarded by critics as a populist statement.

The abandoned “Kufour Houses” are spread across the Upper West, Northern and Eastern Regions, specifically in Wa, Tamale and Koforidua respectively.