IMANI Africa President, Franklin Cudjoe, has said an $89 million contract between Ghana and a Haitian firm, GVG/Kelni is “needless” and a rip-off.

Mr Cudjoe has petitioned the Vice-President’s Office and also had conversations with the Chief of Staff with the aim of convincing them to cancel the contract for the design, development and implementation of a common platform for traffic monitoring, revenue assurance and mobile money monitoring, which, according to him, is superfluous.

Mr Cudjoe argues that firms like Subah Infosolutions and Afriwave Telcom Ltd., were contracted to do exactly what GVG/Kelni has been tasked to do.

The only additional responsibility spelt out in the new contract with GVG/Kelni, he said, is the task to monitor the Mobile Money Interoperability system, which, according to him, is already being done by the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems Limited (GhIPSS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bank of Ghana, thus, needless, too.

Per the GVG/Kelni deal signed in December 2017, the government of Ghana will dole out a monthly payment of $1.5 million to the Haitian firm over a five-year period, beginning 30 days after execution of the contract.

To him, “This contract is no different from the ones we signed in 2010 and 2015 under Subah and Afriwave. In fact, the two contracts were supposed to do the very things that this new contract is purportedly to do; revenue assurance and check fraud. The only thing that has been added this time around is mobile money monitoring for which we have given GhIPSS $4 million to do.”

“First of all, we don’t know what work Subah did. We don’t know what work Afriwave has done. We don’t know what value they have added to the whole telecom industry for us to warrant another entity to come and repeat the same thing for the hefty sum of 89 million dollars. It is a no no no”, he told Accra-based Citi FM.