THE Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, has directed municipal and district chief executives (MDCEs) in the region not to hesitate to terminate any road contracts that are not being properly executed.
This, he said, should be based on technical advice from road engineers assigned to their districts and municipalities.
Mr Ofosu Ampofo gave the directive when he addressed the opening ceremony of a two-week training programme for engineers of the Department of Feeder Roads (DFR) in Koforidua on Monday.
The programme, which is being sponsored by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), is to better equip the engineers with the rudiments of road construction and rehabilitation to enable them to offer the necessary supervision that would compel contractors to do good jobs.
The regional minister said a lot of state resources and donor funds were being used for road construction and rehabilitation in the rural areas to ease transportation and any shoddy work by contractors would derail such noble objectives that would help alleviate poverty in rural communities.
He, therefore, directed road engineers in the districts to offer technical advice to the MDCEs to enable them to identify and terminate contracts on roads that would not be properly executed.
Mr Ofosu Ampofo stated that the DFR was being decentralised and District Works Departments in the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies were to take over the maintenance of feeder road networks and some assembly projects and expressed the hope that the department would not put any impediment on the transfer of such functions to the assemblies.
The regional minister expressed his appreciation to DANIDA for its assistance to the road sector.
A representative of the Quality Assurance and Technical Services Directorate of the Local Government Service Secretariat, Madam Mabel Adoattor, stated that the continuous unplanned increase in the road network, the inability of road agencies to strictly follow annual programmes, as well as failure of the Road Fund to mobilise the required finances for routine maintenance activities, had resulted in a backlog of routine maintenance.
She said since studies had shown that improvement in road condition improved access to social amenities such as educational institutions, health centres, farm gates and the marketing centres, the training of engineers had become necessary to ensure that road construction and maintenance were properly executed.
Answering questions relating to what some of the participants referred to as punitive transfers of engineers of the DFR, the Director of Feeder Roads, Mr E.N.K. Ashong, stated that transfers were normally effected based on a number of factors such as requests from the engineers due to family reasons and some MDCEs who were displeased with the demeanour of some of the engineers.
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