Roads and Highways Minister, Kwesi Amoako Atta has sworn to wipe out all shoddy road contractors from the system to bring sanity to ensure the country’s roads and bridges are of the high quality.
“Under my watch, we are coming up with very rigid guidelines for road construction to ensure a more stringent selection, certification and supervision process to weed out the self-styled unprofessional contractors from the system,” he said.
He was speaking at the 3rd West African Construction Awards held in Accra Friday night where scores of road contractors and real estates players and individuals were rewarded for their work.
The minister also said the rigid guidelines would also ensure that the incidence of rampant cost overruns in the road sector would be completely avoided.
This is in line with a recent remark by the Communications Minister, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful that measures are being put in place to ensure no government contractor overruns contract cost by more than 10 percent for whatever reason.
Mr Amoako Atta noted that in the construction industry, shoddy work is called ‘sabity’ and it is very derogatory when that word is used to describe one’s work as a contractor.
He said it is even worse when, as minister, so many roads are described as ‘sabity’ under his watch, and that is something he is personally determined to avoid.
“I believe the president gave me the role as Minister out of trust and I am not going to sit by and watch some nation breakers build bad roads and line their pockets at the expense of the country,” he said. “Sabity will surely be a thing of the past under my watch.”
The Minister noted that sadly, some of the shoddy contractors have collaborators in the ministry and so they get away with the poor work they do, but he is confident that the guidelines would ensure strict supervision and monitoring in the bid to avoid sabity.
“People in my ministry, who condone ‘sabity’, will be weeded out – and the self-styled Engineers and Surveyors will also be weeded out,” the minister said.
He believes it is time for the processes of selecting and certifying contractors to be made stringent to stem the shoddy works and save the industry the continuous disasters and embarrassment.
The Minister, therefore, called on the professional players in the industry to help the ministry identify and weed out the few bad nuts giving the entire industry a bad name.
“You often find engineers ceding their role to mere artisans who get contracts and end up doing shoddy jobs, but if we the professionals begin to supervise such persons it will help the country and also save the image of the industry,” he said.
The Minister noted that infrastructure is the foundation of national development and fundamental to economic growth so “we can’t afford to keep developing shoddy infrastructure around the country.”
He also stated that the ministry is coming out with guidelines to ensure that various designs by government contractors factor in judicious land use.
He encourage local industry players to learn from their foreign counterparts in the country and also ensure proper training and capacity building for their peers to bring some sanity into the system.
Touching on the traffic situation in the country’s capital, he said plans are far advanced to implement the 578km Aflao – Elubo project, which include the six-lane motorway stretch to ease traffic at Tetteh Quarshie interchange and other parts of the city.
He also touched on the ongoing public debate about the Madina – Adentan footbridges, saying that there were approved designs for those projects so until he goes on inspection to verify if indeed those designs were implemented or not, he cannot pass a value judgement based on public outcry.
Meanwhile, the Minister lauded all the award winners and promised that the ministry will from henceforth sponsor the awards to encourage professionalism in the industry.
The scheme was designed and organised by Instinct Wave.
Chief Executive Officer of Instinct Wave, Akin Naphtal said construction is at the forefront of economic growth because it creates opportunities for job creation, employment and economic growth.
He said his company will continue to reward the industry that is at the forefront on building infrastructure across the sub-region.
Source: Adom News | Samuel Dowuona
