Gov’t Exposed Over SADA Boost

An attempt by government to justify the recent visit of President Mills to the United States on the eve of Christmas with what appears to be a cooked-up story about a supposed meeting with business investors and £18million deal to boost the much-touted Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) project has backfired.

Reports suggest Ghanaians were not given any prior notification until the day the President left the country because he was rushed out of the country to seek medical treatment,

It has however emerged that the story put out by the government through the state-owned Daily Graphic newspaper and other media outlets about the supposed facility was one that was couched from an earlier one.

Reports claim the amount was given by the British government’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) to Ghana as a result of President J.E.A. Mills’ personal intervention through Professor Jeffery Sachs after he met the American Economist and Director of The Earth Institute at the Columbia University in the U.S.

Apart from the fact that there is no such news about the supposed loan or grant to Ghana on the website of DFID, it has been established that the deal was reached a couple of months ago and reported by a number of Ghanaian media outlets.

The state-run wire-service, the Ghana News Agency (GNA) reported from its Tamale bureau on the Friday, September 16, 2011 under the headline, ‘£18million for SADA millennium village project’ (MVP) that the “British Department for International Development (DFID) in collaboration with Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) is to establish an £18-million SADA Millennium Village Project (MVP) in operational areas in the north” and that “the project, which would begin on pilot basis, would cover portions of West Mamprusi District in Northern Region and Builsa District in Upper East Region and benefitting 30,000 people.”

This was said to have been announced by one Dr Joseph Mensah-Homiah, a Team Leader of the MVP at a validation workshop for the establishment of SADA MVP in Tamale.

Dr Mensah-Homiah said £15 million would be used for major interventions in areas such as infrastructure development, while £1.6 million would be used for monitoring and evaluation and £1.5 million for technical assistance and backstopping.

Some people cannot fathom why the agreement was not signed in the UK, a country that takes so much pride in its national integrity but rather the United States.

Concerns have also been raised as to why a US national Jeffery Sachs made the announcement.

Furthermore, the stories that have so far been published by the various media houses seems to have been written and sent to them since it contains words like ‘His Excellency’ which are usually not used in news reporting.

Interestingly, the Daily Graphic story did not also carry a by-line (the name of the author of the story).

Some Ghanaians doubt the credibility of the story that claimed the President meet some business investors.