
Prioritise Maintenance – Ghana Highway Authority to Gov’t
The Ghana Highway Authority (GHA) has urged government to give same priority it gives to new road projects to the maintenance of roads.
GHA believes that the practice where we put so much focus on constructing new roads and neglect old existing ones must be corrected now.
They made this call when an evaluation team from the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) met them for the 2022 elevation exercise. The evaluation exercise draws the curtain on the operations of Specified Entities who signed the statutory performance contract with SIGA for the 2022 year.
Ing. Lawrence Lamptey, Deputy CEO in-charge of Maintenance, stated that the increasing complaint about bad roads is because of lack of maintenance of old roads which erodes all the gains that newly constructed roads are supposed to gather. “If we build the roads and neglect them, we should expect them to go bad and when they do people will fail to see the good works in road sector” stated the Deputy CEO Maintenance. He urged government to give priority to this to preserve the quality of old roads.
The GHA also pleaded with SIGA as the oversight body to appeal to the Ministry of Finance to approve a pending recruitment approval before them in favour of the Authority. This they say will help them augment a much-needed staff strength as currently they lack staff in the six newly created regions of the country.
The evaluation focused on the operations, financial and on governance and compliance issues that formed the basis of assessment for 2022.
The Acting Head for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Mr. Eric Adjabeng who led the SIGA team chaired deliberation.
Present from GHA were Ing. I. K. Mensah (Board Chairman), Ing. Christian Nti (CEO), Ing Collins Donkor and Ing. Lawrence L.L. Lamptey (Both Deputy CEOs) and other senior management team members.