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Sad SADA Saga
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- Created on Monday, 05 May 2014 00:00
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Editorial: Sad SADA Saga
Our compatriots from the northern sectors of the country have been shortchanged. In the past few years they have been hoodwinked into believing the sugar-coated promises dangled before them by vote-seeking politicians who turned up in flashy vehicles.
They claimed to be their kith and kin and so should be trusted to seek their interest: it has all been a ruse as evidenced from the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) debacle. The worrying details which continue to shock even those outside that part of the country, by the scale of cheating and open thievery through wanton diversion of funds, is an important case study in the diversion of public funds.When the now vexed SADA initiative was dangled in front of them with all the accompanying propaganda, little did they know that their own kith and kin were going to use the initiative to enrich themselves even as they remained in their forlorn situations.
Emerging details about how the interests of the target groups were ignored through the breaching of best practices are mindboggling and melancholic.
The shortchanged people of the Northern regions can take consolation in the fact that some of their kith and kin have mounted a spirited fight against those who shortchanged them: they have been active in the past fortnight or so, spewing important details about the tendentious deals.
On Saturday Mr. Dominic Nitiwul, Deputy Minority Leader in Parliament, spewed details, for instance, about issues of conflict of interest and how this breach facilitated the formal thievery by persons who we least expected could have been involved in this degree of public funds siphoning.
So what is the fate of the GH¢75 million sitting in a call account somewhere in one of the financial institutions? And now the depleted stock will be replenished from the public coffers, even as the said amount of money rests somewhere, perhaps irrecoverable, given this government’s record in dealing with similar cases – the tainted judgment debt payments being ready examples.
Thinking about the whole concept, one wonders whether guinea fowl and dry season planting of trees are the best means of bridging the gap between the North and the South. Now that the guinea fowls have flown away, trees dead and the investment lining individual pockets through unsophisticated thievery, the eradication or even the reduction of poverty in the Northern regions could be light years away, unless there is a paradigm shift.
It is interesting the speed with which a new board was constituted as if to veneer the filth of its predecessor.
That all that glitters is not gold finds appropriate expression in the membership of the fallen board of SADA.
SADA will remain the most painful injury to be sustained by the people of the Northern regions at that level. And paradoxically, it was inflicted by elites of that part of the country who are showing no remorse for the mess.
Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and both sides are talking, Ghanaians will be primed with the necessary details to make their judgments devoid of propaganda from government hounds.
Source: Daily Guide/Ghana
