Anti-Corruption Campaigner, Vitus Azeem, has criticised the government’s move to award the 5G network rollout contract to NextGen InfraCo, which was just a week old at the time of approval.
Mr Azeem has raised concerns about sole sourcing and awarding contracts to companies which may lack a proven track record.
“That has been the behaviour of this government; sole sourcing, giving contracts to companies with no track record is so unfortunate.
“We have a procurement law that exists to ensure competitive bidding with the hope that we will get value for money for the contracts that we award but it appears that this government always finds an excuse to subvert the procurement law and that is unfortunate. This leads to a lot of losses for the country and something has to be done about it,” he said in an interview on Accra-based Citi FM.
The Communications and Digitalisation Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful at a press conference on Thursday confirmed that NextGen InfraCo was established just one week before receiving the contract.
In justification, the Ablekuma West MP explained that, the company was specifically created for this purpose because there was no existing neutral infrastructure company capable of handling the rollout at that time.
She added that, auctioning the contract was not pursued due to previous experiences and setbacks that had hindered the rollout of the country’s 4G technology.
Since its introduction in 2015, 4G has only achieved a 15% nationwide penetration.
But Mr Azeem has questioned the transparency of the transaction.
“Certainly, if she [Ursula Owusu-Ekuful] claims that the company was just formed for this because they could not get an appropriate company to bid, did they advertise? What are the tax records of this company and who are the beneficiary owners of this company?
“We have a law that requires the disclosure of beneficial owners; are they politically exposed persons or are they affiliates of the party… these are questions that they need to answer if they are talking about transparency and accountability,” he added.
He continued, “If they are trying to justify then they need to come out with more details to convince us otherwise what they have said is not enough as to be the genesis of the transaction.”
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