Government has given the hint of plans to pull down the Accra International Conference Center and rebuild it to a state-of-the-art facility. The full cost of the reconstruction is estimated at 800 million cedis as set aside in the 2022 budget. Meanwhile, the minority in parliament is raising concerns about transparency within the procurement process involved in this exercise.
The chairman of the Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Brian Achempong, argued that the ministry had, in accordance with the advice of experts, decided to rebuild the AICC at a cost of €116,384,500, with the equivalent of 814,691,500.
Meanwhile, although it agrees in principle to the move, a minority insist that the details of the procurement procedures leave much to be desired.
“What we are concerned about, Mr. Speaker, is the lack of transparency in the plans to rebuild a new building,” he said on Friday. Member of Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Abalakwa, said that his attention has been drawn to the expenditure of 65.7 million made on page 273 of the Budget Statement for Fiscal Year 2021 and Economic Policy.
He further pointed out that the committee was told that the project would be executed under a public-private-partnership agreement, which he says has now been repurchased under a non-concessional loan as per his investigation.
“A non-concessional loan cannot be a PPP agreement,” he insisted, wondering what caused that disparity. Responding to this, Foreign Minister Ayorkor Bochwe says that it is too early to make such claims.
However, he assured the House that all the procurement process surrounding the arrangement has gone through the Public Procurement Authority and will be placed before the House for further deliberations before execution.
The facility was constructed in 1991 to host the 10th Ministerial Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. Since then it has become the convergence point for many national and monumental events over the past 30 years. However, engineers have deemed the facility unfit for purpose as structural defects have been uncovered during recent expert assessments.
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