Funding for the Bui City
Mr. Fred Oware, in other to justify his claim that funding existed for the Bui City Project submitted a schedule of payment for the whole Bui Dam Project for verification by members of the media. Unfortunately for him, there was nowhere in the 17 items listed was mention made of the Bui City.
Under schedule number 17, Mr. Fred Oware fraudulently sought to misrepresent item 17.06 as Bui City and Irrigation Project when in fact, the document he tended mentioned irrigation structures with the sum of $12 million.
Additionally, an amount of $19 million, which has been earmarked for road and bridge construction to link the Bui area to the main roads is being mischievously misrepresented by Fred Oware as intended to construct town roads within the proposed Bui City.
Fred Oware also, when asked about feasibility study and architectural drawings and layouts of the Bui City, tended in responses to letters he had written to various state institutions requesting them to set up offices in the proposed Bui City.
In Mr. Oware’s response to the issue of additional funding of $167 million for the Bui Dam Project, Mr. Oware alleged that the additional funding was needed because my company had supplied blocks with inflated prices to the resettlement component of the project whose total value comes up to $11 million.
Rejection of Sub -Standard Aggregates
On the issue of the rejection of the aggregate/ chippings, Mr. Fred Oware displayed his worse ignorance about the project agreement he claimed to have implemented for over a year.
First and foremost, Mr. Oware should know that as per the project agreement the BPA Board has no say as far as the sourcing of materials by the contractor, Sino Hydro is concerned.
Furthermore, when BPA exercises its right to reject sub standard materials, all the related cost is borne by the contractor. So from where was Mr. Oware coming when he suggested that the current Board insists on a particular supplier of chippings which is going to increase the project cost by additional $50 million?
Mr. Fred Oware made the biggest fool of himself before the Ghanaian media when he tended in minutes of a so called First General Meeting of the Consultative Committee of the Bui City when asked to produce the minutes of Bui Board meetings held under his stewardship.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like at this stage to turn my attention to the representatives of the media houses that attended Mr. Oware’s ill-fated press conference.
1. Is it not strange that no one amongst you raised any question when minutes of a totally different body were distributed to you as evidence of meetings of the Bui Board?
2. Can you please explain your loud silence when payment schedules representing Bui Irrigation structures are presented to you as evidence of funding arrangement for Bui City?
3. Were you satisfied as members of the fourth estate of the realm, when responses to letters written to the Ghana Fire Service, Ghana Meteorological Services, Ghana Armed Forces and the Judicial Service requesting for their expression of interest in the Bui City Project were presented to you as the feasibility reports or architectural designs of the Bui City?
4. If these are the documents some of you claim to have in your armpits with which you are jumping from one radio station to other pretending to be working in the national interest whilst in fact the effect of your work is to cow down people who have mustered courage to expose wrong doing in society, then God save Ghana.
In conclusion, I want to call on all media houses who are interested in the truth to pursue the case of the Bui Dam Project vigorously, by examining all the documentation that is available on the matters of the absence of Board Minutes, quality of Aggregates, Land Acquisition and funding for both the Bui City and the Bui Hydro Project to help Ghanaians form informed opinions about whatever has happened or has not happened at Bui.
Thank you very much and may God Bless our homeland Ghana.
Signed
Johnson Asiedu Nketiah
General Secretary, NDC
03/03/2011
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