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Work on the halted Saglemi Housing project will restart in November of this year, according to a statement made by Minister of Works and Housing Kojo Oppong Nkrumah.
The $200 million project, which had been started during the previous NDC government, came to an end after a value-for-money audit showed that, out of 5,000 apartments, only 1,506 had been finished.
After the cabinet issued fresh directions, however, the minister of Works and Housing, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, announced that talks are now taking place with two of the selected companies to support the government’s public-private partnership, which would enable work to start again in November.
“Negotiations are currently ongoing and we expect that in early November, work would resume after the new developer is signed up to go the site,” he said.
He made these comments at a ministerial press briefing on September 30.
The Minister stressed that the new arrangements do not mean the housing project is being sold.
“We reiterate that we are not selling these projects. We are working in the PPP [Public Private Partnership] framework to complete these projects. The fact that the government of Ghana does not have money in the treasury to advance for us to finish does not mean these projects should remain stalled,” he said.
If action was not done to finish the projects in which the state had made significant financial investments, Mr. Oppong Nkrumah clarified, the projects would begin to deteriorate.
He continued by saying that in order to rescue the situation, the ministry turned to a public-private collaboration, which should open the door for more initiatives.
The ideal approach, he continued, is to collaborate with the private sector to generate money if we don’t want to wait for the government to release that money and we don’t want the projects to keep deteriorating.
Additionally, he promised that the money contributed by the private corporations would be returned to them when the projects were finished and put to use.
Source: Ghanatodayonline.com
