By Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah, Member of Parliament for Ho West, has urged for a forensic audit into the operations of the World Bank’s country office and the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID).
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Citi FM, Bedzrah emphasized concerns over the significant expenditure on the project with limited transparency.
Parliament recently endorsed an additional $150 million loan from the World Bank for the GARID project.
Bedzrah criticized the project’s current implementation approach, advocating for phased execution instead. He, along with Minority Leader Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, has submitted separate petitions demanding forensic audits into the matter.
“I have requested and the Minority Leader has also requested that there should be forensic auditing of the World Bank’s Ghana office and the GARID project. We have suspicions that there is something that is not right and why do I say that, in my field, if you have a project and you design a project, the highest you can go is either 10 percent or 20 percent and a maximum of 30 percent for additional work, but in this case, you are going close to 60 percent for additional work, and that tells you that a lot of things were not considered at the initial stages, and so that project should be phased.
“That project should be a second phase and not the continuation of the other one and so if it is the continuation of what you have started, it calls for integrity and issues that need to be verified, which is why we are calling for a forensic audit.”
