No merit in allegations against Board Chair - Ghana Water MD

Managing Director of the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), Dr Clifford Braimah, says calls for the removal of the Board Chairman of GWCL, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, by a section of the workers, is baseless and without merit.

The members of the Public Utility Workers Union of the Ghana Water Company Limited in the Ashanti Region started the protest for the immediate dismissal of their board chairman and a deputy managing director of the company.

The workers expressed this by displaying banners at entrances of the company in Kumasi with inscriptions such as ‘Save Ghana Water Company Limited Operations’, ‘Ghana Water Company Limited Workers Say Board Chairman Must Go’, ‘No To Third Deputy MD Operations’ and ‘Chop Chop Must Stop Now’. They are calling for the dismissal of the two officers.

They accused the board chairman of instigating the removal of the workers representative on the board and signing of cheques.

But Dr. Braimah has indicated that the allegation is without merit and borne out of ignorance.

According to him, a meeting with the Public Utility Workers Union and also attended by the secretary general of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the executive secretary of the State Enterprise Commission resolved the issues.

“There are issues the workers raised and perhaps if we had engaged them earlier it wouldn’t have gotten to this level. First, they spoke about the board chairman removing the workers representative on the board which was not the case. There was actually an anomaly and the board itself said lets correct and they didn’t understand and they thought the board chairman was behind it; the person has since taken his seat at the board,” Dr Clifford revealed.

On the allegation of the board chairman signing cheques on behalf of Ghana Water Company, Dr Braimah again dismissed the allegation as baseless, saying, “I as the managing director knows the board chairman has not signed any cheque, there is a general rule that any time the managing director is not there, the deputy MD should not sign cheque above a certain threshold without recourse to the board,” he indicated.

Information available suggests the management of the Ghana Water Company Limited will meet the workers on these developments to ensure industrial harmony.

Meanwhile, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, a legal practitioner by profession, who is also Member of Parliament (MP) for Effutu in the Central Region, has declined comment on the latest development, preferring rather to allow an internal mechanism for dispute resolution as the company works to address the issue.