Dr Omane Boamah, Minister of Communications, on Friday reiterated government’s commitment to supporting local engineers to play active roles in many sectors of the economy.
Dr Omane Boamah said this when members of the Ghana Consultancy Engineers Association (GCEA) paid a courtesy call on him in Accra.
He said in order to ensure that there is value for money in every contract that government awards, a mechanism called an engineering audit had been instituted.
This would enable independent engineering audit of contracts in order to confirm whether the amount charged for a project was appropriate.
He said the newly amended Ghana Investment Promotion Centre law also favours local firms and urged them to take advantage of it.
Dr Boamah also urged members of the GCEA to engage and strengthen their relationship with other Ministries such as Works and Housing, Roads and Highway and other state agencies.
Mr Kofi Asare-Yeboah, Chairman of GCEA, noted that, local firms play subservience service to foreign firms, especially in donor funded projects, even though the local firms end up doing most of the work.
“There is great disparity between fees charged by foreign firms and that of local ones, even when they have been selected in a competitive bidding, and are normally held down below their costs, which is inhibiting the development and growth of indigenous firms’, he said.
He called on government to institute measures to empower and protect Ghanaian firms.