World Bank Exposes Akufo Addo Administration Over US$ 560 million COVID FUND

World Bank Country Director, Pierre Frank Laporte has revealed that the World Bank had given the Akufo Addo administration a whopping US$ 560 million for COVID-19, instead of the US$ 100 million popularly quoted by the Finance Ministry.

Mr. Laporte made this revelation in an interview with Accra-based Joy News.

His revelation showed how much of the funds received that were not accounted for by the Akufo-Addo government.

“We’ve provided US$430 million to Ghana to fight COVID-19. And this includes different activities including initially the communication campaign, the sensitization campaign, equipping labs, equipping new facilities to receive patients, to treat patients.”

Additionally, he said Ghana received US$130 million from the World Bank to fund the purchase of vaccines.

Alongside these, the bank has also been undertaking projects targeted at Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which are the backbone of Ghana’s economy.

According to Mr. Pierre Laporte the Bank accelerated the disbursement of projects like the Ghana Economic Transformation projects which targeted SMEs in particular.

However, in March 2020, the Finance Minister was in Parliament to claim that the government had earmarked US $100 million for the fight against COVID-19 and that the outbreak is estimated to cost Ghana GH¢ 11 billion (some US$ 2 billion).

Since then, the Akufo Addo government had secured almost US$ 2 billion as Special Drawing (SDR) facilities from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Last year, a corruption assessment report was prepared by an alliance of anti-corruption organisations called the Community Development Alliance and the Commonwealth Foundation, revealing massive corruption in the disbursement of COVID-19 funds by the Akufo Addo administration.

The report showed how a significant portion of the US$ 2.1 billion (GHC 12.4 billion) COVID-19 funds sourced from various avenues was blown by the government on shady deals.

According to the group, the procurement processes for the acquisition of “Veronica Buckets”, Temperature guns, feeding programmes, face masks, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) among others were done in an opaque manner with little accountability.

The report is curiously titled “Strengthening COVID-19 Accounting Mechanism (SCAM)”

In it, even though the Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, for instance, has attempted to deny it, the report reveals that some US $1m contract awarded by the Akufo Addo administration to develop the controversial COVID-19 tracker app to two foreign companies namely iQuent Technologies and Ascend Digital Solutions “raises substantial corruption issues”.

According to the SCAM, Ascend Digital Solutions was registered just a month before the contract was awarded in Jersey, a tax haven and the contract sum appears bloated. “Same applies to the GH¢1.4m ($240,000) spent on the launch of the tracker,” the SCAM stated.

The SCAM report also revealed that some US $1.2million meant for the payment of 900 contact tracers employed by the Ghana Health Service to work on case detection, contact tracing and reporting, was fraught with underhand dealing that has left the amount mostly unaccounted for.

Among other findings include an amount of GHc2million allocated to transport frontline health workers during the partial lockdown in Accra missing GHc1, 622,000.

It also sounded an alarm on a US$7.4 million allocated for community engagement that cannot be accounted for “It is unclear how $7.4m earmarked for community engagement and risk communication – from 1st release of $35m from the World Bank was spent. A National Information Contact Center (NICC) at the Accra Digital Center was set up to provide information on COVID-19 and related matters but unclear how much GoG spent on that set-up,” said the report.

“An amount of $12.7m was earmarked for containment, isolation and treatment – from 1st release of $35m from the World Bank. GoG spent $2,163million on 16 hotels and guest houses during the initial wave of arrivals. Even if GoG spent an additional $2million on all the other isolation centres during the initial wave of the pandemic, there appears to be an unspent fund of $8.6million within this allocation that needs further investigation,” the report read.