Mr Isaac Ashai Odamtten, a former Tema Metropolitan Chief Executive has called on the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) to complete an office complex he started to provide enough accommodation for decentralized departments.
Mr Odamtten who is now the Member of Parliament for Tema East said the vision to build a multi-purpose office complex during his administration was to ameliorate the office accommodation problem of departments in Tema.
The said office project was abandoned after the former MCE left office in 2017 even though it was up to the second floor awaiting roofing and finishing.
He made the call when answering a question on his take on the abandonment of the office project when he took his turn on the Ghana News Agency-Tema Industrial News Hub Board Room Dialogue aimed at creating opportunities for state, non-state, industry players and other stakeholders to address topical national issues.
Mr Odamtten said it would have been appropriate for the Assembly to even furnish the ground and first floor to be used by the decentralized departments who were scattered across the metropolis after their ejection from the premises of the TDC Development Company Limited.
“As we speak now education doesn’t have, department of trade and industry doesn’t have, social welfare, we have 17 decentralized departments and most of them do not have,” he said.
He expressed worry at the state of the project saying “that facility you see there was a facility that was borne out of the assembly’s performance, it was not a government project, it was the assembly’s performance project, we were growing the assembly’s internally generated fund and so we went to the assembly and got a kind of regulation approved.”
Mr Odamtten added that the regulation indicated that every year, the growth in revenue not the total revenue would be allocated to 40 per cent for investment, 30 per cent for goods and services, and the remaining 30 per cent for staff welfare, adding that “this was communicated clearly and consensus was built among staff.”
He said with that, staff started enjoying mid-month allowance of 15 per cent of their salaries saying he told himself that “you can’t have a situation where somebody is at the office working and another person is at the assembly meeting and then he gets the allowance and the one in the office doesn’t get.”
He said they used the same growth in revenue to train metro guards at the police training school adding that the second aspect, which was goods and services helped the Assembly under him to create a second team at the waste management department which saw to the changing of sewer lines at site 14, 15 and 16.
“The third leg which is investment, that 40 per cent in growth in revenue was what started the office project, and so what happened to it beats my imagination,” he said.
He said “in 2015/2016 the Assembly grew its revenue from somewhere 19 to about GHS 27 million to have eight million difference, when you go to a contractor and say look I have this receivable.
“I have for the year 40 per cent of eight million is about 3.2 million, so for the year I have this potential revenue, I want you to complete this project say in 18 months but we will pay you over two or three years, why won’t they agree”.
