Minister of Health, Dr. Bernard Okoe-Boye, has said that all the district hospitals under the Agenda 111 projects will be fully operationalised.
In the meantime, he said, the Akufo-Addo administration is moving with speed to ensure that some of them start operating by the end of the year.
“We are working with speed to operationalise some of the Agenda 111 hospitals. All I can tell you is that in the first term of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, all the district hospitals in Agenda 111 will be completed and operationalized,” he said
0 during the launch of the 2024 manifesto of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In an earlier comment, Dr Bernard Okoe-Boye blamed struggles to get lands in urban communities and local contractors’ lack of capacity for the delay in completing the Agenda 111 project.
It is recalled that in August 2021, President Akufo-Addo cut sod in the Ashanti Region to signal the beginning of the hospital projects. He said during that event that the project was scheduled to be completed in 18 months across the country. However, the projects have not been completed with few months to the end of 2024.
Dr Okoe-Boye said that some local contractors who were engaged for the Agenda 111 project had to be changed for nonperformance has blamed struggles to get lands in urban communities and local contractors’ lack of capacity for completion delays.
Dr Okoe-Boye explained that the government decided to rely solely on indigenous contractors for this project because the initiative was locally funded.
But in the course of the project, he said, it was realised that some of the contractors did not have the capacity to undertake the construction, hence the decision to change them.
Dr Okoe-Boye said these while explaining the reasons for the change of timelines for the completion of the project when he appeared before the Parliamentary Committee on Government Assurances on Thursday, August 1.
He said “In certain places, even towns were fighting over which town we take the decision to host Agenda 111. If we don’t resolve these things and rush you can get a backlash so land issues are the first thing that accounted for the change in the timelines. Most communities are urbanized, even finding the minimum of three or four acres for Agenda 111 was a problem. So Accra for example, most places that are part of agenda 111 don’t have the same design of a very smooth flow,
“The second has to do with the fact that Agenda 111 is a programme that tolerates or entertains largely or only Ghanaian contractors. The president was very emphatic, if you check most of the projects done over the years in the Fourth Republic in the health sector, the contractors were foreign contractors and most of the time it so happened with the facility, the country that gives the facility has a way of making sure that the contractors are from their country .
“This one, [Agenda 111] because we dared to fund it locally, we also said local contractors. Fortunately or unfortunately, the local contractors are not on the same weight, some made a lot of noise that ‘I can’ but you send them to the site, and for six months they are still struggling. Other contractors, you send them to the site and within six months they are at the lentil level so there are some agenda 111 sites that the contractor had to be changed for non-performance.”
