Edem Agbana, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Parliamentary Candidate for Ketu North, has criticised the government’s recently launched Performance Tracker.
In an interview with Selorm Adonoo on The Big Issue on Citi TV/FM, Agbana chastised the government for boasting about projects that lack national significance.
He characterized the government’s attempts to account to Ghanaians as “mediocre”.
“They are bragging about 13,000 projects, when you go on their platforms, even when an MP refurbishes a school building using the MP’s Common Fund, they are listed as projects undertaken by the government. Projects undertaken by district assemblies and some of them are very small projects.
“When we are talking about the central government, we look at the big things, the significant projects that have national relevance. And so, when the district assembly in my locality constructs a 4-unit toilet, and that is listed by the government as an achievement, that we must celebrate, I think that we are delving into the realm of mediocrity.”
When comparing the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) government’s Performance Tracker to the opposition National Democratic Congress’ (NDC) Green Book, he argued that the latter holds more relevance than the former.
“All the projects in the Green Book are major central government-initiated projects, these are not district assembly projects. If the NDC had decided to put into the Green Book, public toilets, boreholes that were drilled. I’m telling you the NDC may have recorded nothing less than 40,000 or 50,000 projects. I have a problem when the central government takes some of those projects at the district level to create an impression that they have done something that has never been done before.”
Regarding the errors identified in the Tracker, Edem contended that those involved in the misinformation of the 67 projects must be held accountable.
“In less than 48-hours, we have exposed you [government], and then you have gone back to say you made a mistake with the entry. The truth is that it is not the system itself that identifies the mistakes that they made. These are the issues we raised…What processes did the Ministry of Information go through to validate the projects they listed?
“It means somebody didn’t do his work right, is that not it?… You come back and say you are correcting errors; it tells you that are not sincere with their output. This cannot be forgiven; somebody must be held accountable for misinformation. The mediocrity of this government is too much. The government was not meticulous enough in their attempt, haste to put the information to impress, they decided to put contents that are not a true representation.”
The government launched the Performance Tracker on Wednesday, April 10, 2024, with the aim of promoting transparency and accountability in the implementation of infrastructure projects across the country.
Following the launch, the government acknowledged that 67 entries were mistakenly included in the list of projects featured on the Performance Tracker.
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