Seven sue Transport Minister and AG over 116 rebranded buses

The controversy surrounding the rebranding of 116 buses at a cost of GhȻ3.6 million has landed at the Human Rights Court.

Seven people have sued the Minister of Transport and the Attorney-General and are asking for an order directing the Minister of Transport to fully disclose the content of the contract for the rebranding of the buses.

They are specifically requesting for an order directed at the Minister of Transport to furnish them with copies of the contract for the branding of the 116 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) buses.

The applicants are Lolan Ekow Sagoe-Moses, Kathleen Addy, Francis Kennedy Ocloo, Evans Amegashie, Yaw Baffour Ankomah, Kwame Barkers Ansah and Michael Annor.

The applicants have noted that in the exercise of their constitutional right to information, they wished to ascertain, through the court, and from the Minister of Transport, answers to certain pertinent questions concerning the award of the contract for the branding of the 116 BRT buses.

Some of the issues the applicants want to ascertain are whether or not the award of the contract was done in adherence to the Public Procurement Act; whether or not the contract procurement was competitive or sole sourced and whether or not there were other alternatives to this contract.

It is the Applicants case that sometime on or about the 16th day of December, 2015, news reports emerging from the Parliament of Ghana revealed that the Government of Ghana, acting through the Ministry of Transport spent GhȻ 3.6 million on the branding of 116 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) buses at a cost of approximately GhȻ 31,000 per bus.