Ranking member on Parliament's health committee, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh
Ranking member on committee on Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, has disclosed that the jamboree to commission only about 200 ambulances out of the 275 by the government was needless.
He says the amount spent on the funfair could have been used to complete the installation processes for the other remaining ambulances.
"The jamboree and funfair was needless," he said, adding that though he propagated for distribution of the ambulances, the accompanying funfair was a waste of state resources.
Speaking on Okay FM’s 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, he explained that he is reliably informed and his checks confirmed that only one hundred and thirty (130) out of the two hundred (200) ambulances displayed at the ceremony were fit for purpose.
"The other ambulances are still under installation processes so why waste money to commission just a few."
"The NPP government should know that this will not win them elections," he said.
The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Tuesday, 28th January, 2020, commissioned and presented three hundred and seven (307) new, state-of-the-art ambulances to the National Ambulance Service, in fulfillment of his 2016 campaign pledge.
According to President Akufo-Addo, the 307 ambulances are “fitted with advanced life support equipment and tracking devices, to be distributed to 275 constituencies, i.e. 1-Constituency-1-Ambulance, to be managed by the National Ambulance Service, and the remainder of thirty-two (32) ambulances to the headquarters of the Service.”
Presenting the ambulances, at a ceremony at the Independence Square, the President noted that, when he took office in January 2017, the National Ambulance Service had 130 stations, 10 regional control rooms across the country, and only 55 ‘semi-functioning’ ambulances.
“In December 2015, two hundred (200) ambulances were supposedly purchased by the Mahama government, out of which only thirty (30) arrived in the country. As though this was not enough, the thirty (30) were declared “not fit for purpose because they had cardinal defects and did not come with any medical equipment. This was completely unacceptable, and my government was determined to rectify this unhappy state of affairs,” he said.
