Government should pay contractors for dredging Odaw-MP

Accra, June 8, GNA - Mr Sampson Ahi, a Ranking Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Works and Housing, has appealed to the government to urgently pay the contractors that dredged the Odaw drain and Korle Lagoon.

He said the dredging of the river and the drain was part of the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project intended to solve the perennial flooding in Accra in order to save lives and property.

Mr Ahi who is the Member of Parliament for Bodi, said the contractors, Dredge Masters, a wholly-owned Ghanaian construction firm, started dredging in December 2015 but the actual contract was signed in June 2016, and had since not been paid.

Mr Ahi, a former Deputy Minister for Works and Housing in the previous administration, made this known when Parliamentary Select Committee on Works and Housing toured some parts of Korle Lagoon to familiarise themselves with the progress of work in Accra on Thursday.

He said although the contract was signed under the National Democratic Congress government it was binding on the current New Patriotic Party administration, therefore the issue of payment should not be politicised since the project was important and intended to prevent flooding in the capital.

For his part, Nana Amoako, the Chairman of the Committee who is also the Member of Parliament for Upper Denkyira East, called for attitudinal change among Ghanaians, especially regarding indiscriminate disposal of garbage into drains.

He said it cost government huge sums of financial resources desilting drains and urged the citizenry to comply with sound environmental practices.

Mr Wise Ametefe, the Project Co-ordinator and Registrar of Engineering Council, said the contractors pre-financed the project and had spent about $10 million dollars.

He said a hydrographic survey conducted on Korle Lagoon established that there was more than one million metric meters of silt deposited in the lagoon that needed to be dredged.

However, he said, the contract the contractors signed with the government only tasked them to dredge 500,000 metric meters.

He, therefore, called for review of the contract so that the contractors could desilt the quantities of silt remaining in the lagoon.

According to him, the contractors had completed desilting the Odaw drain but there was the need for the signing of maintenance contract with the government in order for them to desilt the drain on regularly to prevent flooding since silt flowed into the drain from sub-canals during rains.

In addition, he said, there must be re-designing of the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project (KREP) Interceptor at the estuary of the Korle lagoon in order to allow free flow of water in and out of the lagoon.

He noted that there should be silt traps along the various adjoining sub-canals to Odaw drain to control siltation.

Captain Ansar Ahmed Khan, Project Director of Dredge Masters Limited and Mr Sena Adiepena, Operations Manager, briefed the members of the Committee on the various components of the project.

They said the KREP involved dredging of the Odaw drain, which was completed in July 2016.

However, less than 30 per cent of dredging of Korle Lagoon had been conducted due to contractual limitations.

They said there were dredging and non-dredging components of the project which comprised landscaping of the green vegetation around the lagoon, beautification, desilting and putting up of infrastructure to achieve the contractual design. GNA

By Godwill Arthur-Mensah, GNA