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Minority in Parliament to boycott the approval of agreements for ‘inflated’ Pwalugu Dam project

The Minority in Ghana’s Parliament have threatened to boycott all activities related to the approval of agreements for the construction of the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam.

Ghana's Parliament

The house currently has three agreements on the dam pending approval. However, the Minority has called on the government to suspend the $993 million deal immediately.

In 2019, they resisted the approval process before Parliament went on recess. This was to allow for due diligence to be done on the deal.

Addressing the press, Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, said the cost of the project had been inflated and padded.

“Pwalugu dam of Nana Addo Dankwa and Bawumia is three times Bui, three times best practice, three times established figures globally, and it can only be four times padded with fraud, and we demand as a minority that we will not accept this. No one should expect that the minority will be part of any process to give approval to this because it is completely a rip-off.”

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The government is expected to use almost one billion dollars for the entire project. The minority raised concerns about the electrical generation component which is estimated to cost about $300 million to generate 60 megawatts of power.

The Pwalugu multi-purpose dam is a 60MW facility that is expected to cost $366 million.

However, when it is combined with the irrigation component of the dam, the entire project is estimated to a billion dollars.

The Pwalugu Dam, according to the President is expected to “avert the perennial flooding caused by the spillage of the Bagre Dam”.

It will consist of three main components; a hydropower plant; a solar farm; and an irrigation scheme covering an area of some twenty-five thousand (25,000) hectares.

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The project is set to be the single, largest investment ever made by any Government in the Northern sector of the country.

The project which will be executed by a Chinese construction firm will start in April 2020.

The job which will be executed Power China International will be supervised by the Volta River Authority (VRA) over five years.

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