Bongo: Cash sinks as New ICT Centre turns “Free Hotel”

Starr News has spotted an abandoned brand new Community Information Centre in the Bongo District of the Upper East region which is yet to be commissioned but already serves as both a massage parlour for some dating students and a looting ground for faceless criminals.

The building, erected with thousands of taxpayer’s Ghana cedis on the grassy bank of a river flowing from a source in nearby Burkina Faso, is yet to be handed over to the Bongo District Assembly since the construction of the project, awarded by the Ministry of Communications, ended in 2012.

A police storm of the multipurpose structure is expected from Wednesday onwards to prevent further looting and abuse after almost all the accessories in the building have gone missing in a robbery raid generally believed to have taken place not just once, and at night. It is probably the first pre-handover project decay the region has known in many years.

The attractive block had been stripped of about 450 new louvres as of the time Starr News took a stroll through the many empty rooms at the centre. Several sections of the ceiling and a number of doors had been removed and hauled away from a facility designed to offer essential information technology services.

The floor in some of the rooms was broadly carpeted with the waste of stray ruminants and the creamy walls of the edifice, which is also meant for postal transactions, were tattooed everywhere with intriguing graffiti- mostly nicknames and names of celebrities- written with charcoal, chalk and permanent markers. There were also brown football prints all over the milky walls, showing that kids from the quiet neighbourhood play soccer games in the delicate rooms in the same unrestrained manner they would do outdoors.

“Sometimes you come here and see condoms,” said Boniface Abisiba, the Assemblyman for Atampisii, the electoral area where the centre almost shares boundaries with the Bongo Senior High School. “Boys and girls come here and pretend they are reading. When they leave, they leave used condoms behind in the rooms. Some of the town people also use this building as a free hotel.”

Politicians, chiefs wail over decay

The big mess at the ‘virgin’ facility, occasioned by an unexplained neglect that came about even before any official handover, has drawn as much rage from notable figures as the wave of questions it has also triggered among ordinary observers.

One of such figures is the immediate-past Member of Parliament for Bongo, Albert Abongo, who is credited with lobbying government in 2011 to put up the centre in the constituency at the time veteran lawmaker for Tamale South, Haruna Iddrisu, was the Minister for Communications.

“It is regrettable that the project has dragged on for such a long time,” Mr. Abongo lamented. “The benefits that would have accrued to the youth of the community- and the students, particularly as it is closer to the secondary school- are lost! We can only request that something is done.”

The Paramount Chief of Bongo, Naba Baba Salifu Atamale Lemyaarum, had welcomed the project with great joy and he reconciled the youths in Bongo Central and those in Gowrie after a conflict erupted about 5 years ago over a proposed location of the centre. Today, the traditional ruler himself is a very unhappy man about the state of the same centre.

He vented his grief to the district assembly at a dedication ceremony held recently to usher into office the new District Chief Executive for the area, Peter Ayimbisa.

“The project is supposed to be an ICT centre cum post office. This project was completed two years before elections. No handing over was done. Today, go and see. They have ransacked everything there. The doors, the louvres- everything there is gone! When I pass there and I see it, I just don’t understand. I wish I were the President; it wouldn’t have been nice,” he told the crowd in a sober atmosphere.

Centre looting is third major raid in Bongo in 3 months

The development at the Community Information Centre is the third to be mentioned in public within three months in the district.

Residents are asking why the contractor, or the assembly, did not engage watchmen to protect that huge investment pending a handover.

“The beautiful edifice has been left to decay… Leaders in position of responsibility in the district have abandoned and deserted the facility. This is willfully causing financial loss to the district,” sighed Edward Asekere, former Assemblyman for Balungu, a community to the north-west of Bongo.

In March, this year, a water pumping machine was stolen at the Bongo District Hospital. The loss took a heavy toll on patients whose relatives had to struggle for water from afar for surgeries and deliveries. Authorities said 52 deliveries, 9 caesarian sections and 17 general surgeries were done with water fetched by relatives from contamination-prone sources for 3 weeks.

The following month saw two offices at the district assembly broken into at night with some sensitive government files and a desktop computer, believed to contain information about the execution of the Ghana Social Opportunities Project (GSOP) in the district, picked away.

“If we do not rise up as a community to fight such people, we would be in trouble. They would gradually move from offices to homes not just to steal property but may even end up harming you. Some of them are within our community. We need to expose them to face the law. I would like to also appeal to the police in the district to up their game,” the current MP for Bongo, Edward Bawa, had warned shortly after he had gone to the rescue of the hospital with a water pump in April, this year.