Prez Mahama to blow over GHC 20 Million without approval

President John Dramani Mahama on Wednesday demonstrated that he intends to run Ghana like an 'apampam' store when he launched a campaign to blow over twenty million Ghana cedis without parliamentary approval.

On Wednesday, the President officially launched the National Sanitation Campaign, in which 16, 000 men and women are to be deployed across Ghana as members of a sanitation task force to educate the public on issues of sanitation.

Apart from the 16, 000 men and women that are to be deployed, the government would also acquire 80 refuse trucks, 5000 shovels, 20, 000 refuse bins, 500 brooms, 500 communal refuse containers, 500 wellington boots and 5000 rakes for the program.

The program is stipulated to last for three months, and very conservative estimates put the amount of money to be spent on the exercise as being over GHC 20 million.

What makes the whole concept worrying is that already, the government, in this year alone, has paid waste management companies and contractors hundreds of millions of Ghana cedis as fees for waste collection, and the question that many are asking is whether all that money has gone down the drain.

The second most crucial question is that National Sanitation Campaign would seem to be an off the cuff creation by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development in response to the call on it by President John Mahama, and is outside of the planned and projected budgetary programs of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for the 2012 budget year.

Like an 'apampam' store, President John Mahama and the NDC government have started spending state money without recourse to parliamentary approval.

In all, for this program alone, the government, apart from the 16,000 workers, would spend huge sums of moneys on vehicles and other equipment over the three months period.

Yesterday, spokespersons of government were strangely mystified about the cost of the entire exercise, and were unable to clarify whether the President had sought parliamentary approval for his latest exploit.