NPP could have easily ‘borrowed’ to fix the roads and avert needless deaths – Kwakye Ofosu

Former Deputy Communications Minister, Felix Kwakye Ofosu has said the recent loss of lives on the N4 highway is a reflection of the NPP’s priorities and or lack of it thereof.

According to him, the ruling government has borrowed in several regards to work on projects they deemed important and they could have done same in this instance, to fix footbridges for the safety of Ghanaians living in the Madina-Adentan area.

“In terms of borrowing, if you look at their own issuance calendar and the annual debt management report that they send to parliament, with domestic bonds alone, they have borrowed more than one hundred and sixty billion dollars, so if this road was a priority they could have easily have borrowed money to fix it to avert the deaths that we saw” he said while addressing the issue on Newsfile Saturday.

Kwakye Ofosu believes that the needless deaths in the country could have been averted if recurrent expenditure was prioritized over capital investment.

“Domestic tax revenue alone over the last two years, they have been in power run in excess of seventy billion Ghana cedis as of the middle of this year so, they’ve had substantial revenue and time to fix this particular project except that they have prioritised recurrent expenditure over capital investment” he added.

Mr. Kwakye Ofosu advised government to refrain from shifting faults on the previous government considering they performed adequately in constructing the roads but didn’t have enough time to complete the foot bridges. Evading blame he says, will only infuriate the citizenry even more.

“The attempts to blame the previous government for the situation that we are in is only serving to infuriate the citizenry the more and that is why you saw that level of anger at Adenta. Surely John Mahama when he was president added to that road to the extent that he could because the last update was given in August of 2016 by Inusah Fuseini who was Roads Minister at the time. He said the road was substantially completed about 98 percent complete the only thing left was the footbridge even then structures have been erected to show we were doing it. We simply run out of time and we left”

“Having assumed office it was the duty of the government of the day then to complete it, but if you do not complete it and people complain and they stage demonstrations you need to be sincere and admit that there were some lapses in your approach” He added.