#FixTheCountry organising homeless communities to occupy Saglemi Housing Project – Convener

Organising the homeless to occupy abandoned project constitutional, Oliver Barker-Vormawor

Govt has not started repaying the loan used for Saglemi project but it has been left to rot, Barker-Vormawor

Successive govts do not comply with constitutional provisions to continue past projects, #FixTheCountry

Convener of the #FixTheCountry movement, Oliver Mawuse Barker-Vormawor, has disclosed that the group was currently mobilising homeless communities to occupy the Saglemi Housing Project abandoned by the government.

According to Barker-Vormawor, their action is in line with Article 41 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, which states that citizens must help protect the country's properties.

"#FixTheCountry is in the middle of organising homeless communities to occupy the Saglemi Housing Project, and this we consider to be our responsibility under article 41 of the 1992 Constitution to protect government properties… and preserving the constitutional injunction that governments must continue passed on projects," Barker-Vormawor said in an interview on Joy News monitored by GhanaWeb.

He reiterated that even though the constitution clearly states that new governments must continue and finish projects started by their predecessors, the canker of abandoned projects was still persistent.

"We are the only country in the world that has put in its constitution a requirement that government must continue past projects. Do you know how much it must take to put that in a national document?" he questioned.

The #FixTheCountry convener said the Saglemi Housing Project, which the country borrowed over 200 million dollars to construct and has not even started paying back, has been left to rot.

"All the power plants there, all the copper wires have been stolen; there is a bus which has been abandoned on-site; the poly tanks are now in a very fragile state, and all the fittings that were done in the building are now completely erased," he added.

"So, I don't understand why we have a state that has very little incentive to protect public property, and we the people themselves sit down and look at them, and then we say this is so bad, and then we walk on. Ten years down the line, we come back, and it is the same thing. It happened under the Rawlings administration; the Kufour administration even built homes up north and left them to rot in the bushes," he further stated.