STX housing project cleared

21/10/2010

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru
THE Attorney-General and Minister for Justice has corrected the anomalies detected in the final agreement on the STX Housing Project.
With the legal hurdle now cleared, the document has been referred to the technical committee on the STX Housing Project for the administrative phase of the housing scheme.
“The Attorney-General has cleared the STX deal and given it back to the technical committee. This week the technical committee will meet and discuss the report,” a Deputy Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Dr Louisa Hanna Bissiw, told the Daily Graphic in Accra on Tuesday.
On September 20, 2010, a ceremony at the Castle, Osu for the Korean firm and the government to sign the deal on the project was rescheduled because of some anomalies detected in the deal.
Consequently, the issues were referred to the Attorney General and Minister for Justice for fine-tuning to pave the way for the construction of 30,000 housing units for the security agencies.
Dr Bissiw said all the legal issues involving the STX project had been completed, and indicated that the rest was administrative.
She hinted that all the technical details would be completed soon and “the project will be ready for a take-off by the end of the year”.
Dr Bissiw said the government needed “space and tranquillity” to work on the technical details, and stressed that it would be unhelpful if the details were subjected to partisan political discussions.
“Where we have reached is purely administrative. We have to allow the administration to work,” she stressed.
Dr Bissiw said during her visit to the Central Police Station on Monday she saw the poor state of the rooms, bathrooms and toilet facilities of the police service.
She expressed regret, for instance, that a 44 square-metre room was being occupied by 52 police officers.
Dr Bissiw said the poor state of the accommodation for the security agencies required of all Ghanaians to support the STX Housing Project, stressing that “this is a project we all have to push”.
She said besides the “decent” accommodation that the project would provide for the security agencies, “it will bring money directly into our pockets as 70 per cent of the workforce will be Ghanaians”.
Besides, people would get indirect benefits by the trade opportunities it would create.
Dr Bissiw, therefore, stressed the need for Ghanaians “to put politics aside and support it, otherwise we cannot go far”.