The Minority in Parliament has served notice it will boycott all activities relating to the approval of agreements for the construction of the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam.
Three agreements on the dam, amounting to 993 million dollars are currently before the House pending approval, but the Minority side wants government to suspend the deal immediately.
They resisted the approval process before Parliament went on recess last year, to allow for the requisite due diligence 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” he noted.
Close to a billion dollars is expected to be used for the entire project with the minority raising concerns about the electrical generation component which is estimated to cost about US$300 million to generate 60 megawatts of power.
The Pwalugu multi-purpose dam is a 60MW facility that is expected to cost USD 366 million dollars.
However, when it is combined with the irrigation component of the dam, the entire project is estimated to a billion dollars.
The Pwalugu Dam Project
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.
The project is set to be the single, largest investment ever made by any Government in the Northern sector of the country.
The project will commence in April 2020 according to the Volta River Authority (VRA).
The entire project will be executed by a Chinese construction firm, Power China International and supervised by the VRA over a period of five years.
The irrigation component of the project will cost US$474,042,141.85.
The tax component of the project is US$69,284,727.79 and there is also a cadastral survey cost of US$800,000.00.
The electricity component of the project will consist of US$366 million 60MW hydropower, and a US$55.4 million 50MW solar power, while resettlement, survey and project management cost will amount to US$98 million.
by Ebenezer Afanyi Dadzie
