A former Minister of Health, Dr. Bernard Okoe-Boye, has appealed to the Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah, to intervene in the matter regarding the termination of a contract with Lightwave Health Information Management System by his successor, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh.
According to Dr Okoe-Boye, failure by the Chief of Staff to intervene will lead to financial loss to the state.
“I would recommend that the Chief of Staff engages the services of a professional mediation company. I know of Gamey and Gamey. I did some courses with them. Let Gamey and Gamey come in. They can take up the case from both the Ministry of Health and the vendor’s angle and help resolve this amicably,” he said on Accra-based JoyNews on October 29.
Dr. Okoe-Boye’s comments followed a statement made earlier on October 29 by the current Minister of Health, Kwabena Akandoh during the Government Accountability Series.
Mr. Akandoh stated that the Ministry’s investigations had found serious anomalies in the way the contract with Lightwave Health Information Management System was carried out.
He claims that even though the contractor only completed half of the intended health institution connections, they were paid more than 77 million dollars, or more than 70% of the entire contract amount.
” The contract between the Ministry of Health and Lightwave Health Information Management System never received parliamentary approval,” Mr Akandoh added.
In response, Dr Okoe-Boye said, “This minister, what he has failed to do is to find a way to orderly terminate the contract. One grave consequence is that when the Minister was asked. You have now gone in for someone, and guess what, this new person is not going to complete the rest of the five hundred. He is going to redo the 450 that Lightwave has done. Can you imagine? This is serious financial loss.”
He added that, “what makes me worried for this country is that we have a Minister that is ready to pay a new vendor to start again, work that has already been done, but is unwilling to say that let me give you this money so that you complete this work, so that I can now have access to everything you have…This minister is about to put government in a serious financial loss situation.”
” I will be sad if journalists sit down for Akandoh to pay a vendor to start training workers in Komfo Anokye, a training they received eight years ago. This is not the reset we voted for,” he stressed.
