Ghana was shortchanged in its quest to have a National Digital Property Addressing System for the country, a Member of Parliament has claimed.
According to the Bongo MP, Edward Bawa, the country could have had a better deal had the state actors involved in securing the system being a bit diligent.
The application which was launched by President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is aimed at providing an effective means of addressing every location and place in the country, using an information technology application.
The app, which government said cost the country $2.5 million, has been criticized by some experts in the technology space as well as some civil society organisations.
IMANI Ghana’s Franklin Cudjoe has raised issues with the security risk to the data received by the system.
“I’ve read quite a number of reviews by industry watchers, and some of the comments they’ve made are not necessarily helpful – to think that you could input just any data and generate an address in itself sounds amateurish. There are basic web portals where you input any kind of data it could reject it, especially when you are filling forms. And to hear that obviously, that it is something with this app is quite troubling,” Franklin Cudjoe said.
Some criticisms have also bothered on the cost of the project especially the cost involved in campaign for the usage of the app.
Ghana Post has spent GHC3.5 million on publicity to market the launched digital property addressing system.
And Edward Bawa speaking on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen on Tuesday said that he believes the country could have had the address system for free.
“It is too expensive, Ghana did not get value for money…we could have gotten it for free…,” he said.
According to him, the app operates on Google address system which generates addresses automatically for users.
The erstwhile Mahama administration, he claimed, started a similar process using another app, Asaase.com.
This app, Deputy Communications Minister, George Andah said cannot be compared with the Ghana Post GPS system as Asaase.com lacked technical support and firewalls.
To George Andah, the NDC ought to be ‘ashamed’ and stop criticizing the current administration over the Ghana Post GPS as it failed to initiate a better project than this in its entire eight years in power.
“NDC should be ashamed of themselves for criticizing Ghana Post GPS. If indeed it was free, why couldn’t they do it all the years they spent in power only for Akufo-Addo to do so in ten months?” he queried.