The Minister of Health, Kweku Agyemang Manu, has refuted claims that the current government has abandoned health projects started under the former Mahama administration.
The Minority in Parliament after touring some abandoned hospital projects across the country last week accused the government of failing to address the challenges within the health sector.
But taking his turn at the meet the press series in Accra, Mr Agyemang Manu said the government has secured funds to complete the projects across the country.
“By the end of 2016 the then Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, for some reason did not renew the Letter of Credit (LC) for the contractors to access funds to continue with the projects, so when we came the projects had stalled and contractors had left site because there were no funds for them to continue. It then became my obligation to find a way to get finance to renew the LCs and trigger access to funds to enable them to get back to the site. The Finance Ministry then decided to look into what they had done; they realized that at a glance $175 million was procured as a facility to build these facilities but only one had been completed but cash left was only $38m.”
“Our apprehension was that $38m cannot complete the 6 left, 2 of them not starting at all. So we contacted the funding agency, United Kingdom Export Finance (UKEF), and they assured us that if only we could renew the LC, they would provide additional funding for the projects.”
Source: Ghana/otecfmghana.com/Ebenezer Amankwah
