G. ACCELERATING INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT 30. We have a huge infrastructure deficit in our country. This serves as a brake on our national development and we must aggressively continue improving our infrastructure and find the resources needed for this. We succeeded in obtaining the US$3billion facility from China which is helping us to rebuild railroad infrastructure in the Western Region as well as build new infrastructure for oil and gas. In sourcing and applying all such loan facilities we will, on behalf of Ghana, rigorously seek value for money and police the implementation of projects so that high quality of work is obtained by the country. 30a. By accelerating GDP growth and nurturing expansion of our SME sector, we expect the economy to throw up hundreds of thousands of sustainable jobs over the next few years. 31. Realistically though, not much can be done about transforming the infrastructural base of the country within the next 4 months. To have any chances of success, any new policy options must be founded on a detailed analysis of the state of affairs including a critical evaluation of policies and programmes instituted by governments over the past 2 -3 decades to address the problem. 32. On the broader infrastructure front, the focus over the next 4 months will be to identify priority projects amongst all ongoing projects and bring the weight of the Presidency to bear on managing an agreed plan to guarantee that percentage completion is visibly increased over the period. Beyond admonishing contractors to deliver works on roads and other ongoing infrastructural projects that lead to delays and inconvenience to the citizenry, I have instructed the relevant ministries to secure additional capacities for strictly monitoring timelines for completion of various stages of the projects and within budget. These include the Accra-Suhum road, the Tetteh Quarshie-Adenta road; the Tema-Asikuma-Hohoe-Jasikan-Yendi-Nalerigu-Kulungugu road; the Bamboi-Bole-Wa-Hamile road; Fufulso-Sawla road and the eastern corridor road through. I am directing the Minister in charge of roads to manage an agreed plan to guarantee that percentage completion is visibly increased over the period. Other critical roads that have been bottlenecks and created extreme inconvenience would be tackled. The ministry of roads has compiled a list of such roads in the budget and the Ministry of Finance has released money to for. 33. We have seen how the transformation of our telecommunications infrastructure has been of benefit to our lives. There is still work to be done to improve quality in this sector and to ensure that there is good service provided to customers consistently. 34. Government will also play its part. I have instructed the Minister for Communications to expedite work on completing the eastern corridor rural fibre optic backbone link to provide national data center facilities that connect all public institutions to a single shared communication and computing infrastructure and the installation of a reliable energy efficient digital terrestrial television system. 35. We face challenges with our electricity distribution infrastructure as the pace of replacing age-old infrastructure has not been at par with our growing needs as a nation and we must increase the efforts to make the needed investments towards this. Regrettably also, supply of natural gas from Nigeria has not been regular, giving rise to shortages in our generation capacity. Recently a disruption in the WAGP has knocked out 320MW of our generating capacity. 36. This has led to a resumption of load shedding. Government has taken immediate steps to address the load-shedding challenge. I have directed that an Inter-Ministerial committee chaired by the Minister of Energy must, with immediate effect, engage the critical consumers of electricity, in particular, health and water supply facilities and key private industry establishments, to implement measures that will ensure that the nation’s strategic services and industry are not unduly disrupted. 37. I am further directing the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURC) to strengthen their citizen complaints unit, and publish what measures they have taken when citizens complain of poor service from Electricity Corporation and Water Supply service providers. 38. While we are assured that there would be resumption of supply from WAGP in next few weeks, we will redouble our efforts to make up the shortfall ourselves by speeding up projects we have been working on. We have galvanized every effort to increase our generating capacity, in order that the minimum demand by our industries is met. By the end of October, we will have an additional 300 megawatts of electricity production that will come online for distribution, and this should greatly reduce the inconvenience of load-shedding. 39. We have over the last 4 years accelerated our National Electrification Programme. At least 1608 communities have been connected and 5400 are at various stages of connection. A major constraint has been availability of meters. I have directed immediate release of funds to acquire meters for completion of these projects. 40. I am further directing the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURC) to strengthen their citizen complaints unit, and publish what measures they have taken when citizens complain of poor service from Electricity Corporation and Water Supply service providers.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 15:34:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015