The President, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, was heard lamenting over a spectacle before his very eyes. This was a desolate bushy piece of land where he was expecting to see a magnificent modern market befitting a regional capital.
President Mahama's consternation was that 18 months earlier, that is May 2012, as the Vice President of the Republic of Ghana, he cut the sod, amid the usual fanfare, for the construction of a modern market for Ho, the capital of the Volta Region, which has religiously remained the bastion of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
And here was President Mahama in Ho, being mobbed by hundreds of his supporters. But instead of a beautiful edifice of a modern market he promised the people and which could have bolstered his image and strengthened their confidence in him, all he could behold was a barren patch of land.
Anybody in the President's shoes could appreciate his predicament at the time; that is, if those concerns were genuinely expressed. I do not think that anybody in his or her wildest dreams would expect that the President or even the Vice President would wake up every morning and be touring project sites to see what is going on. Why do we have such a huge government machinery which we continue to shoulder even at a great expense to the taxpayer?
The assemblies administratively come under the Ministry of Local Government, and Rural Development which has a minister and two deputies in addition to numerous technocrats and bureaucrats.
Admittedly, the Ho Municipal Assembly has not had a Municipal Chief Executive Officer since the last one, Mr Kondobisah left office. Even that, as a regional capital, projects of this nature, especially one the President has personal interest in, should not have been abandoned and pushed into extinction without the President getting any briefing on the state of affairs.
That could have saved the President from the anguish of seeing his teeming supporters without any good news for them about the modern market complex.
Otherwise, we dare say that the monitoring mechanism of the government is very poor. It may also mean that most of the projects promised by the government and for which sod had been cut to the great expectation of the people may be suffering the same fate as the Ho Central Market, which never saw any action since the sod- cutting ceremony.
Even though President Mahama promised to fast-track the project, the truth must be told. This is not an ordinary project. It comes under the Ghana Urban Management Pilot Project (GUMP), which is to benefit Kumasi, Tamale, Sekondi-Takoradi and Ho from a 40.5 million euros funded by the Agence Francaise de Development.
If such a foreign-funded project to modernise our towns and cities could be suffocated by what President himself described as 'bureaucratic processes', then we do not have to look far for an explanation as to why we are still where we are when others have embarked upon a mission to explore Mars.
We cannot but give President Mahama the benefit of the doubt and hope that he would live up to his promise to see to it that whatever the bottlenecks are, they are removed as quickly as possible to see the commencement of the project.
It is also important that our leaders should not just move on after sod-cutting ceremonies without looking behind to see what is happening. If care is not taken, our people will lose interest in these ceremonies and see them more or less as mere political gimmicks.
