‘$1m per constituency promise won’t come off this year’ - Anthony Akoto-Osei

The Monitoring and Evaluation Minister, Anthony Akoto-Osei, has said the government’s one million dollar per constituency promise will not come on this year.

“….This is obvious. For example, we are in August [and] the one million dollars per constituency programme, it is only five months to the end of the year so it cannot be fully implemented. But it will definitely start in earnest,” he told Morning Starr Host Francis Abban Tuesday August 1, 2017.

“So that is the reality. We are not going to try to implement a whole year’s programme in five months. We want to make sure that if we start, we start on the right footings so that going into next year it will be in full swing,” he added.

The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) pledged during the 2016 electioneering to provide every constituency one million dollars to deal with problems that are specific to them.

The government announced in March that it will set up an Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Project to cater for the implementation of the promise.

Announcing the plan, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said “Under the Establishment of the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication project, every constituency will be allocated the cedi equivalent of one million dollars to combat poverty. We will allocate one million dollars to each constituency in this house, to improve the lives of rural dwellers and deprived communities.”