The Minister for Works and Housing, Mr. Samuel Atta Akyea has disclosed that the entrance of the COVID-19 pandemic impeded the development of the housing technology government promised.
Speaking in an interview, the Minister noted that coupled with insufficient funds, investor collaboration from Hungary which would have expedited the process was equally truncated due to the impact of the pandemic on economies.
“That is the fact of the matter. You see, the people were very anxious to come and do it, but the funding was going to come from the Hungarian government”.
“If you look at this space of the country, you situate issues of free senior high school, you come to planting for food and jobs and you come to roads, I could submit that we do not have the financial muscle to serious infrastructure like housing that is the fact of the matter.
“We were trying to seek the help of a foreign body and that is the Hungarian government to come to our aid. They were trying to arrange the money… but when we thought that we had concluded the matter they said because of the Covid challenges they are not able to come out now but the letters that we sent and the agreement have still been given to their finance people through the embassy here.
Regardless of the seeming challenges the ministry has been bedeviled with, Mr. Akyea was optimistic of the deal with the Hungarians pulling through.
“We have some light at the end of the tunnel that they are going to come in with the money and the group will come and do its job… the government of Hungary is ready to bring us that grant”.
Commenting on the potential 250,000 housing unit that government intended to roll out, funding from the Finance ministry according to the Housing Minister could have also averted the stall in the continuation of the project of government’s promise.
“We could have done that kind of record if and when we were given the requisite guarantees from the ministry of finance for the investors to come and do the job, because we didn’t have the money. But then the argument was that, a guarantee is equal to debt. Immediately the ministry of finance will issues a guarantee, it is equal to debt and because of the huge capital outlay in the area of real estate, if you don’t manage that situation properly, then we have a situation of we not being able to abstain our debt ratio and that is one argument which I think is strong”.
To rectify the issues, he intimated that what the ministry is pushing hard for is “off take agreement in which there’s no guarantee”.
With this, the terms of agreement suggests that “come and build, and when you have built, we will pay for it on terms”.
“We have another clause in there which says that, in the event that we are unable to pay for them on terms, you could sell the structures… so this is what we are pushing strong to achieve and a lot of them have signed on”.
He also maintained that rolling out projects shouldn’t necessarily be premised on the availability of funds first as competition for financial space doesn’t give enough room to sit on prospective projects.
“It’s all got to do with the financial space. You see, when you put together the developers… you present all these issues as a ministry to where it matters; the finance ministry. So, this is what has gone on, so we were not being fanciful.
“So nobody will sit down there and say that look until I get the financial space I won’t bring out the programs. You present the program and [when] it’s compelling, and they give you the financial space, you go ahead and do it”.
