13-member committee tasked to enforce new building code

A 13-member adhoc committee tasked with enforcing the new build­ing code and ensuring engineering standards in the country has been inaugurated.

The joint-committee comprises professionals from the Ghana Standard Authority (GSA) and the Engineering Council, and as part of their mandate are to ensure ad­herence to engineering practising standards and design codes.

They are also to ensure collabo­ration in quality control access for the use of construction materials, collaborate to promote public education on engineering practic­es, use of engineering products, and collaborate to engage relevant stakeholders that deal with engi­neering products in the country.

Members of the committee are, Gertrude Awumee, Frederick Asare-Yeboah, Carlien Bou-che­did, Miriam Eduful and Joseph Oddei all from the engineering council.

The others are from the GSA and they include, Clifford Frim­pong, Daniel Vincent Arthur, Mr George Anti, Mawul Tsaku, Em­manuel Obeng, Adelaide Akins and Rachel Amanfu.

Inaugurating the committee, the Director-General of the GSA, Professor Alex Dodoo, said the time had come for engineers as professionals to insist on the right things, while the standards author­ity enforces the standards.

He said over the past two years, the authority had been certifying concrete products in the country to ensure that they were in line with applicable standards.

Prof. Dodoo said this was giv­ing consumers who needed quality products access to those products, stressing that “we are making a lot more noise about this because consumers must know.”

He said the inauguration of the joint-committee was criti­cal to Ghana because it literally ensured that the infrastructure in the country was of the expected quality and of the expected stan­dards, stressing that “but more importantly, health and safety are protected.”

On his part, the chairman of the Engineering Council Board, Dr Kwame Boakye, said Ghana was fortunate to have an entity like the GSA that was helping to bring enlightenment to the public.

He said “as a country, we need­ed standards not just in engineer­ing but all facets of our lives and everything that we do, because if you don’t know what standards are, what you have is chaos.”

Dr Boakye said the collab­oration between the GSA and the Engineering Council was to ensure that they were on the same path.

He said the two entities could do a lot of things together, ex­pressing the hope that “after the marriage, after the relationship” it would advance them to the level where standards, engineering and all these become second nature to them.

“We have already executed an MoU but in Ghana you know, we are very good at paper in fact if you go to the shelves in Ghana al­most all the solution to the world’s problems is there somewhere but we don’t execute and that’s what we want to change.”

Dr Boakye noted that one could have ideas and so on, but without people to actually work it, there was no way we could go far and that was the reason why the joint committee had been put together.