Minority To Reintroduce Motion For Probe Into COVID-19 Funds

The Minority in Parliament has announced it intends to reintroduce a motion to instigate a probe into how the Akufo-Addo government spent COVID-19 funds.

Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu revealed this at a press conference in Accra.

“We will refile the motion for a probe,” he told journalists.

The renewed interest is due to a leaked voice recording of Felicia Tettey, the NPP’s 2020 Parliamentary Candidate for Sagnerigu who is heard revealing that the government gave shared COVID-19 funds to party apparatchiks for political campaigns.

In the audio, Madam Tettey is heard saying she alone got Ghc100,000.

According to the Minority, this revelation vindicates their position that the COVID-19 funds were mismanaged by the Akufo-Addo government which has been claiming that it spent Ghc20billion on the pandemic.

“…We the Minority in Parliament, as much as we feel vindicated, we equally feel scandalised by emerging reports by leading members of the new patriotic party. In particular, a lady vice-chair called Felicia Tetteh from the Northern Region is publicly reported to have said that Covid monies were shared among party leadership, constituencies regional and for my purposes, I add, national,” he said.

“So President Akufo-Addo is presiding over a gargantuan fraud in the spending and disbursement of Covid expenses. We are calling on the President and reminding him that the 1992 Constitution, is premised on probity and accountability and that if he has any respect for the values of integrity, let him probe into Covid-19 expenditure,” he stressed.

It would be recalled that in February, the Minority Leader, the Minority Chief Whip, Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka and Minority Spokesperson on Finance, Cassiel Ato Forson, had filed a motion to Alban Bagbin, asking the House for a bipartisan probe into the GH¢8.1 billion expenditure by the government.

Even though that motion was admitted, later the First Deputy Speaker, Joe Osei Wusu, who subsequently presided over proceedings in the House in the absence of Bagbin, dismissed the motion.

The Minority at the time had been seeking to know how the government could claim that it had spent Ghc8.1billion on Covid-19 when it originally had asked for only Ghc1.2 billion from Parliament.

Later, the government would claim that it has actually spent Ghc20billion on COVID-19.

Mr. Iddrisu added that “now we can understand why a motion by the Minority to probe Covid expenditure, by an institution which should be the most fundamental institution and guardian of the public purse, Parliament, will dismiss the motion even at birth by actors of the new patriotic party political administration.”