Your projects have not been abandoned

Health minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, has told former president John Dramani Mahama, that his uncompleted projects in the health sector have not been abandoned.

The Dormaa Central lawmaker said that the completion of the projects was delayed due to the outbreak of the pandemic.

He mentioned the La and Shama hospitals as examples of the projects that were about to start when the second wave of the virus started.

Mr. Mahama has on many occasions accused the Akufo-Addo administration of abandoning many of the projects started during his government’s tenure.

The former president said he finds it disappointing that a number of the projects remain uncompleted since his administration left office in January 2017.

He asked the president to complete his projects before starting Agenda 111 to build 111 hospitals across the country.

Speaking to the chiefs and people of the Upper East region as part of his thank-you tour of the region on Tuesday, August 17, Mr. Mahama who was the NDC’s presidential candidate in last year’s elections said “Governance is supposed to be continued and so when the government takes over from the other it continues what the previous government was doing. When I came into office, as best as I could the projects that we had inherited from the preceding government we tried to continue them.”

But Mr. Agyeman-Manu said “Since I joined the Ministry, no project has been abandoned. We have categorized all the projects that we inherited from 2017 and to projects which commenced in 2017 that have been completed. Then we have slides on projects that commenced in 2017 and the various status of these projects.

“Last year we did a lot of sod cutting on some projects and we are being asked questions as to why these projects have not started and have not been completed., let me state that it looks like very soon, very quickly all of us Ghanaians are forgetting about the fact that the world was hit by a pandemic which disrupted our economic activities.

“Project like La, Shama, twelve different hospitals is to be done by just one contractor we did sod cutting for all of these in October November. By December Covid’s second wave has taken in and it’s attending disruptions. We were not going to work.”