[ 2012-05-14 ]

ET Mensah

ET Mensah: Where was GREDA when NPP built the presidential Palace?
The Works and Housing Minister ET Mensah has
described as "whimsical" and "hypocritical" the
New Patriotic Party’s opposition to Guma’s
construction of 500 affordable houses in the
country.

The Ministry has signed a Memorandum of
Understanding to allow the South African company
to build the 500 houses to mitigate the over 1
million housing deficit in the country.

The NPP said the contract to Guma was a slap in
the face of the Ghana Real Estate Development
Association (GREDA) who has shown overtime that it
has the capacity to build the affordable houses
for the country.

The party’s Head of Communications, Nana Akomea
said after the STX fiasco it made sense for
government to revert to GREDA for the housing
projects and was shocked another foreign company
had been contracted to build the houses.

But in a reaction at a press conference on Monday,
the sector Minister, ET Mensah said the NPP has no
moral right to talk about local contractors,
especially when it, whilst in government,
contracted a foreign company to build the
presidential palace.

Joy News’ Sammy Darko who was present at the
conference reported the minister as saying, the
4,750 affordable housing project started by the
NPP before it lost power in 2008 was fraught with
myriad of problems.

The minister dismissed claims it has taken the NDC
government too long to complete the affordable
housing project.

“I am in my third month. I have not been here for
three and half years. It took the NPP six years to
think about affordable houses,” the minister
noted.

Whilst admitting that the STX housing project took
a lot of time of his predecessors, he added
government had to conduct thorough diagnosis and
audits of into NPP's botched housing project.

According to ET Mensah over 470 of those houses
had been awarded free of charge to persons working
in the offices of the then president and ministers
of state.

He said some of the 383 contractors who were given
large sums of monies also failed to turn up at
their project sites.

He said the government will adopt "its own style"
and with a holistic approach solve the problem of
affordable housing in the country.

Mensah described the contract to the GUMA group as
a "new dawn, and a new strategy" to solve the
housing deficit in the country.

Source - MyjoyOnline

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