Joseph Boahen Aidoo, the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Cocoa Board has said the report of the audit conducted on the construction of cocoa roads in some parts of the country cannot be made public.
The administration of John Mahama was accused of awarding over 230 road contracts to the tune of GH¢3.5 billion under the cocoa road project to the detriment of COCOBOD’s finances.
The government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), therefore, halted the construction of the cocoa roads across the country in 2017 over corruption concerns.
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Mahama speaking at Bopa as part of his tour of the Western North Region, dared the government to produce the said report adding that the government has deliberately started reconstructing the roads few months to the election for political gains.
“They abandoned the projects because of sabotage and politics. Because they realized we are close to elections, they have started work on the roads again. I want to know where the audit report is. I am here at Bopa asking the NPP government to publish the audit reports on cocoa roads for everyone to see.”
“The laws of Ghana indicate that if a government starts a project and loses the elections, it is incumbent on the next government to continue with the projects. But this is not what we are seeing. When the NDC was voted out of power, there were a lot of contractors working on projects, but when this government took over, they halted all of them, saying it was auditing them. It has been four years now and I believe that even if it was the Bible we were reading, we would have covered from Genesis to Revelations by now,” he added.
But Aidoo Boahen said the report of the audit conducted can’t be made known to the public.
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He said “Nobody is hiding anything from anybody with respect to this report, why do we have to publish it? This was Cocobod’s operation, It was intended for an administrative purpose, If you need it, you just have to apply for it.”
In an interview on Accra-based Joy FM, he said the Mahama administration did not give Ghanaians value for money in awarding those contracts.
