James Agyenim-Boateng, a former Presidential Staffer has described as a misplaced priority, the sod-cutting ceremony earlier this week for the “Ghana Award House” project.
Commencement of the project, which is a new administrative building for the Head of State Award Scheme was done by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
But for the former Deputy Minister of Information & Tourism, Akufo-Addo’s penchant for cutting sods with no concrete work on the ground was worrying.
“Last year you promised to build 88 hospitals and it remains a promise; you’ve started none. Yet you’ve ‘cut the sod for the commencement of the “Ghana Award House”’? This is a misplaced priority!” he posted in response to the president’s tweet of April 7, 2021.
President Akufo-Addo in one of his COVID-19 addresses last year hinted that government planned to build 88 hospitals; this same announcement was also captured in the 2020 manifesto of the New Patriotic Party, NPP.
The number has since been scaled up to 111 in what the president described as Agenda 111 in his 2021 State Of The Nation Address.
Agyenim-Boateng’s reaction is, however, mild compared to that of Ningo-Prampram MP, Sam George, who said in a Facebook post that the “Ghana Awards House” was a case of a government that had taken leave of its senses.
Social media reactions about the project were largely requesting that government come clean on the propriety of such a facility at this point in time.
According to the presidency, once completed, the Ghana Award House project will be a two-storey office block, with a two hundred (200) capacity conference room and training facilities designed to house the National Secretariat of the Head of State Award Scheme.
It will be constructed at a cost of five million cedis (GH¢5 million), and it will help drive growth, impact, and the effective and efficient delivery of the Award Scheme to all young people in Ghana and beyond.
The president noted that the “completion of the Ghana Award House project will put Ghana ahead of many of the countries running the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award”, and will mean that Ghana “will be the second country in Africa, after the Presidents’ Award of Kenya, and one of the few countries globally, to have its own administrative office”.
He also announced that, in support of the operation of the Award Secretariat, its operational cost will be borne by the Office of the President, under the direct supervision of the Chief of Staff.
