The Minority Spokesperson on Roads, Governs Kwame Agbodza says the Akufo-Addo government must take full responsibility for the poor state of many roads in the country.
According to him, the current state of roads in the country is worse than it used to be during the John Mahama administration.
Mr. Agbodza who was speaking to Bernard Avle said the government’s failure to ensure prompt maintenance of the roads is the cause of the situation.
The country’s roads have generally deteriorated especially with the onset of rains, with many roads in various parts of the country developing deep potholes and galleys, putting them in terrible shapes.
Some of the roads have also become immotorable.
Some residents have had to stage protests to draw attention to the deplorable nature of their roads but that does not seem to have achieved any significant result.
Residents of Pokuase-Mayera, Tarkwa, Kwabenya, Ho, Dawhyenya, Ablekuma Manhean, among others, have all staged protests over the nature of their roads.
Mr. Agbodza said the government is likely to fall behind schedule for maintenance of roads in the country this year.
“We are in a very big situation. The state of Ghanaian roads has never been this worse. Right from the city in Accra here, the performance in terms of routine maintenance is falling behind schedule. In 2017, 2018 they fell behind schedule. We are in 2019, the release will suggest that we are going to fall behind schedule and the effect of that is that, our roads are in very deplorable states,” he said.
Commenting on the government’s suspension of all cocoa road projects to allow for what it said is a thorough audit over suspicions of inflated contracts among others, the Adaklu MP said the supposed audit was needless as it has not been able to establish any incident of inflated contract sum or fraud in the NDC’s award of Cocoa roads project contracts.
“They claimed they have discovered that under the NDC, for almost 200 Cocoa Road projects, some of the contracts were inflated, some of the roads didn’t exist and we awarded them on contract. I took them on…..The fact is that not a single Cocoa Road project as we speak has been identified as having been procured fraudulently,” he said.
“Three years down the road, the government is unable to publish the report of the Cocoa roads project.”
He expressed regret over what he said was the government’s decision not to take over cocoa road projects that had been completed or almost completed with the explanation that it was going to audit them.
