Infrastructure not only brick and mortar – Bawumia jabs NDC

Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has taken a swipe at the National Democratic Congress (NDC), emphasising that infrastructure is not only about “brick and mortar”.

For him, there is digital infrastructure as well which has been a major area of development for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, he said.

“I would also want to mention that infrastructure today, in this world of digitisation, is no longer just brick and mortar.

“We are talking about soft infrastructure and we are talking about digital infrastructure.”

Dr Bawumia made this known on Tuesday, August 18 when he spoke on government’s infrastructure policies at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in a virtual townhall meeting.

The Vice President stressed that infrastructure cannot be said to be physical projects alone.

“The world is changing and digitisation has come and we have for the last three-and-a-half years been embarking on major process of digitising this country and putting in place critical, soft digital infrastructure which is going to transform this country.”

This comes in the wake of criticisms by the NDC that government has nothing to show for physical infrastructure despite the country’s ballooning debt stock.

Earlier in his presentation, the Vice President listed 17,334 as the total number of infrastructure projects initiated by the current administration.

“Of these, we have completed 8,746 and there are 8,588 ongoing.”

But he stressed: “We are not only building infrastructure. We are building a nation.”

He mentioned the issuance of national identity cards under the National Identification Authority (NIA), digital property address system, mobile money interoperability and universal QR code to be launched soon as some of the digital infrastructure projects erected to transform the economy in what he described as “the new testament”.