The President of the Association of Road Contractors Ghana, Stephen Kwaku Attatsi, has cautioned against encouraging the public to monitor and report on road construction activities, pushing back on a call by the Roads Minister for citizens to record and share videos of contractors’ performance on project sites.
Roads Minister Governs Kwame Agbodza had urged Ghanaians to “take ownership of road projects in their areas,” calling on the public to “record and share videos where possible” and help the ministry track contractor performance on the ground.
The directive, framed as a citizen accountability initiative, was welcomed in several quarters as a practical tool for real-time project monitoring in a sector that has historically struggled with oversight gaps and delayed delivery.
But Attatsi, speaking in an interview with The High Street Journal, argued that citizen reporting introduced more confusion than accountability into a technically complex process.
The public, he said, lacks the engineering knowledge to interpret what they observe on site correctly, and reports generated from that position of incomplete information could unfairly implicate contractors who were executing work in full accordance with their specifications.
Citizens, he noted, would see a contractor “digging a hole about seven metres” and have no basis for understanding whether that excavation was required, on schedule, or correctly dimensioned.
Their report, however well-intentioned, would not be “technically” grounded.
Attatsi was direct: the entity “in charge” of monitoring site activity should be providing “reports every day” through the proper engineering chain, not the community.
Supervising engineers deployed on each project carry that responsibility, and their assessments, based on direct technical observation against contract specifications, are the appropriate instrument of accountability.
Citizen video, he implied, substitutes sentiment for measurement and risks generating political noise rather than actionable information.
He also addressed a related concern about road quality, specifically the widespread perception that local contractors underperform relative to their foreign counterparts.
Attatsi rejected the characterisation.
Foreign contractors, he noted, are “using Ghanaian engineers” and renting Ghanaian equipment, and any quality differential does not originate in the nationality of the contractor.
The problem, he argued, lies in political interference in project specifications, situations in which contractors are pressured to “manage” budgets across more kilometres than the allocated funding can properly cover, resulting in reduced road thickness and compromised durability.
No contractor, he said, would voluntarily deliver substandard work and invite the reputational damage that follows.
The quality failure begins when the allocated funds do not match the instructed scope, and a contractor told to “manage it and do it one inch” to extend coverage cannot simultaneously deliver a four- or five-inch surface without additional funding.
On the broader question of ministerial site visits, Attatsi was supportive, describing them as “a called duty” rather than an exceptional measure, and one that should involve technical committee members alongside the minister.
His qualification was procedural: sites should be notified in advance, and the visit should be framed as an engagement rather than a “forensic checking,” particularly in rural construction environments where the complexity of terrain, weather patterns, waterlogging, and community litigation introduce variables that aggregate oversight cannot easily account for.
The exchange reflects a broader tension in Ghana’s infrastructure delivery system, between the political imperative for visible accountability and the technical reality of how construction projects are properly managed.
Both the minister and the contractor president are responding to the same problem: road projects that take too long and deliver too little.
