SADA non-partisan - Charles Abugri

The Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) was an establishment of an Act of Parliament to deal with fundamental issues affecting the country, Charles Abugre, Chief Executive Officer of SADA has said.

According to him, the institution is non-political and has held series of meetings with all the political parties in the country on their plans to achieve the purpose for which it was established.

SADA as an institution has been a controversial topic for political debate as Ghana approaches the December 7 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The flag bearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has always held the view that SADA has been used as an avenue for rabid corruption by the John Mahama government.

Meanwhile, President Mahama has held the point that SADA is the vehicle to promote investment in the savannah regions for development. He said SADA had been accountable as well as built bridges with all including international partners necessary to promote investment in the savannah regions.

Speaking on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana on Tuesday, 1 November, Mr Abugre said: “It is really a non-partisan institution that was set up by law to do things which are fundamental for this country. That means we are to open up conversation with all political parties. We held a number of roundtable meetings with all the political parties, we shared with all the political parties our plans and manifestos”.

“We invited the leadership of all the political parties to the SADA office to discuss the master plan. All of them – the NDC, the NPP, the CPP, NDP, PNC – all of them came. SADA was established to do three strategic things and one was to provide strategic planning guidelines to the government and the purpose of the strategy is to try and identify game-changing investment necessary to transform the economy.”

“The second purpose for which it was set up was to find ways to mobilise financial resources and the third purpose is to provide the coordination platform. So, strategic planning is one of the main purposes of SADA. We initiated that process nearly two years ago starting with the partnership with the Town and Country Planning to do a special plan and then ending up with two external supports – one from Brazil, a Brazilian company to look at how we can learn from the transformation of the Brazilian savannah. Today they are a major bread basket, to transform the Ghanaian savannah.

“The second is we have a relationship with the Singaporean Government and the Singapore Premier Planning Authority mainly to draw three lessons from the Singapore experience: the first lesson being the successful planning of their urban centres. 85 per cent of Singapore’s public housing is driven by the Singapore government, the government also drives the industrial and industrialisation plan.”