President John Dramani Mahama has urged Ghanaians to give him a second term mandate to among other things enable him complete construction works on some bad roads in the country.
Speaking on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana on Tuesday, Mr. Mahama explained that, although government has done considerably well in road infrastructure, there is still more that needs to be done.
He noted that his government has allocated an amount of $150 million every year to construct roads in the country. “There are still bad roads and we are going to come to them as we finish these.
The thing is to have a programme which is what we have; and I have said that, we are injecting 150 million for five years into the six cocoa growing regions. And so as the contractors finish they are being given other roads to do.” “So when I say I have done roads it doesn’t mean that you should go and look for a bad road somewhere and say but President Mahama there is a bad road here, yes, we will come to it.
That is why I deserve a second term to be able to do those roads you are complaining about,” he added.
Demo over bad roads
There have been series of demonstrations staged by some Ghanaians in recent times in protest against bad road networks. Some areas of these areas include East Ashiyie, in the Adentan Municipality, Ashaiman, Bolgatanga, Hamile in the Lambusie Karni District of the Upper West Region among others.
We’ve improved roads
President Mahama said his government has improved many roads ever since he took over the administration of the country.
“We’ve improved in the area of roads. We are doing a lot of massive work when it comes to the road network.” He said when he went around campaigning in 2008 and 2012, he observed that a lot of the roads in the country were in very bad shape “and any chief I went to complained that the major issue they had was the road network; so I decided that we must do something about it.” “So we have three sources of funding; the government of Ghana budget which is approved by parliament every year.
And we also introduced the cocoa roads improvement programme of which we take 150 million dollars every year from the cocoa floatation and we dedicate it to improving roads in the six cocoa growing regions.
And then the third source of income is the enhanced road fund which was passed as part of the energy levy and under that we have identified strategic roads in the country and we are paying to improve those roads,” Mahama added.
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