The leader of the All People’s Congress (APC), Hassan Ayariga, has taken on the government for abandoning the Saglemi housing project.
The project, which was commenced under the Mahama administration, has stalled due to a decision by the Akufo-Addo administration to probe the financial arrangements around the project.
Hassan Ayariga was disappointed the government had failed to make the project accessible to Ghanaians.
“This cannot happen in a country where millions of workers are struggling for accommodation, irrespective of the party they belong to. This is not a political party project. This is a government of Ghana project, and we cannot allow it to rot, no matter the circumstances surrounding it. It does not make sense for anybody to leave such a project abandoned for years,” he said on the Citi Breakfast Show on Tuesday, April 27, 2021.
In 2018, the then Minister for Works and Housing, Samuel Atta Akyea invited the Attorney-General to scrutinize the agreements.
There were reports that key contract documents were missing or had inconsistencies.
The government believed there was a misappropriation of funds in the project, resulting in shoddy work.
Mr. Atta Akyea has accused a former Works and Housing Minister, Collins Dauda, of altering the original agreement for the Saglemi housing project without recourse to Parliament.
He claimed that after Parliament passed the agreement in October 2012 for the construction of 5,000 housing units, the then minister reviewed the contract scaling down the number of units to some 1,500 units and later to 1,024 units after another review in 2016.
The first phase of the project, with 1,500 housing units, which was commissioned by John Mahama in 2016 have been left unused.
The project, which was intended to reduce the country’s massive housing deficit is seated on a 300-acre land with one to three-bedroom apartments for low-income earners.
