Madina-Adenta highway: NPP government favours consumption over capital investment

Former deputy communications minister, Felix Kwakye-Ofosu has said that government could have averted needless deaths in the country if the government had prioritised recurrent expenditure over capital investment.

According to him, the Akufo-Addo led government is not committed to rolling out infrastructural needs unlike the Mahama-led government.

Speaking with regards to the 24 lives that have been lost on the Madina-Adenta Highway which sparked a spontaneous protest by residents in the area, Felix Kwakye-Ofosu said government could have prevented the unfortunate incidents if it had prioritized infrastructural projects in the country.

“…In terms of borrowing, if you look at their own issuance calendar and the annual debt management report that they send to parliament, with domestic bonds alone, they have borrowed more than one hundred and sixty billion dollars, so if this road was a priority they could have easily have borrowed money to fix it to avert the deaths that we saw” he said

“In addition to this is the fact that domestic tax revenue alone over the last two years, they have been in power run in excess of seventy billion Ghana cedis as of the middle of this year so, they’ve had substantial revenue and time to fix this particular project except that they have prioritised recurrent expenditure over capital investment” he added.

He added government’s continuous blame of recent events on the previous government will rather infuriate Ghanaians the more.

“The attempts to blame the previous government for the situation that we are in is only serving to infuriate the citizenry the more and that is why you saw that level of anger at Adenta. Surely John Mahama when he was president added to that road to the extent that he could because the last update was given in August of 2016 by Inusah Fuseini who was Roads Minister at the time. He said the road was substantially completed about 98 percent complete the only thing left was the footbridge even then structures have been erected to show we were doing it. We simply run out of time and we left

Having assumed office it was the duty of the government of the day then to complete it, but if you do not complete it and people complain and they stage demonstrations you need to be sincere and admit that there were some lapses in your approach” He stated.