Roads and Highways Minister Kwasi Amoako-Attah has expressed his bewilderment at the pursuit and hoarding of ill-gotten wealth, considering that we all eventually pass away and leave everything behind.
Lamenting the pervasive levels of bribery and corruption within his own ministry and others, Minister Amoako-Attah highlighted the consequences of this misconduct.
He pointed out that trans-border haulage drivers from Burkina Faso and Code d’Ivoire are able to enter Ghana’s territory with overloaded trucks, evading scrutiny at axle load points. These culprits, driven by their desire for personal enrichment at the expense of Ghana’s road infrastructure, will ultimately meet their demise and leave their ill-gotten gains behind.
The minister expressed his anguish over how corrupt officials are exacting a heavy toll on the country for their own selfish gains.
“All of us and our government, are spending millions and billions of money to fix our roads. We get transporters from other neighbouring countries; coming to pick up cargo from your ports and they don’t respect our axle load regime. See all these vehicles here and they park for hours on end”, he complained to journalists after inspecting works on the ongoing VALCO Roundabout-Kpone road reconstruction project.
He said: “My information is that some of them are now going through the documentation process at the port, so, they park on the shoulders of the roads for more than 24 hours”.
“They have destroyed the shoulders of our roads and when they come to the roads themselves, because of the unauthorised axle load that they carry, the roads that we spend our hard-earned monies to build, they destroy them”, an angry Amoako-Attah observed.
He added: “And, my information is that they cannot do the same in their countries – the French-speaking countries – Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, and so on. When they get to Paga, they offload part of their cargo before they enter those countries but in our country, we have axle load centres; the road from the port, there’s supposed to be an axle load centre there; we have barriers on our roads, we have some of the customs people manning some of our barriers; the police are manning our barriers but they have free access through our corridor”.
“What are we doing to our country because of bribery and corruption? And we are the same people who call on the president, who call on the government, to fix the country”, he fumed.
He revealed: “There are a lot of corrupt people, there are a lot of thieves in my ministry. You sack them, you employ new ones, and when they come, the new ones are even worse than the old ones that you sacked. What kind of country are we building for ourselves?”.
He philosophised: “I don’t know what people want. We will die and leave everything behind. All of us; those who came before us are all gone. We heard the big names, people with money and wealth, where are they? Look at what we are seeing and we are citizens of this country?”.
