After Senegal, Ghana is basically the most smartly-liked African nation the put officers were called out for misappropriating or mismanaging funds dedicated to struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Ghana audit service file on the government’s covid-19 expenditure for the length going from March 2020 to June 2022 is widely commented on social media.
In all, GH¢21,844,189,185.24 (over a thousand million US $) changed into mobilised to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana.
The 119-page long file highlighted irregularities in the management of some tranches of the funds.
Amongst them, the charge of unapproved anguish allowance on the ministry of recordsdata. It regarded that “senior management workers and diversified supporting workers” of the ministry paid themselves an complete quantity of GH¢151,500.00 as COVID-19 anguish allowance for coming to work all the strategy during the lockdown length.”
That went against “presidential directives and without approval from the put of dwelling of job of chief of workers.”
Certainly finest frontline health workers had been to build up an additional allowance of 50 p.c of their smartly-liked wage per thirty days for March, April, Might honest and June.
Failure to care for provide of vaccines
Per the file, the authorities did not care for provide of some COVID-19 jabs it paid for. The Ghanaian Ministry of Effectively being paid an quantity of US$120,192,379.80 to UNICEF/AVAT for the provision of vaccines.
On the other hand, factual “5,109,600.00 doses of vaccines valued at US$38,322,000.00 had been supplied to the National Cool Room.”
The chief director of the Ministry of Effectively being explained that the volume changed into paid in anticipation of receiving the total vaccines internal a transient rental of time for vaccination in the nation.
He cited “surprising vaccine donations into the nation, coupled with dinky vaccine storage potential and the gradual uptake by Ghanaians to be vaccinated” as factors that made it not possible to build up the Janssen “vaccines that had been paid for”.
This changed into leaving a dissimilarity of over 81 billion US$.
Some Ghanaians took to Twitter to train their disappointment and tagged the file #NPPGrandCovidTheft.
The Ghana audit service performed the audit in step with its statutory mandate and following a put a question to by the Minister for Finance.
Many officers in sub-Saharan Africa are suspected of misappropriating or mismanaging funds dedicated to struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic, along side in Cameroon, Guinea and South Africa.
Extra sources • Ghanaweb
