Ghana doesn’t practice true project management principles; it just does firefighting. This is the blunt verdict of the President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Henry Kwadwo Boateng.
The president made these remarks at the 3rd International Project Management Bootcamp organized at Cape Coast.
Justifying his remarks, the engineer explained that the country’s development projects often lack proper planning, discipline, and continuity. Instead, the projects are often initiated by knee-jerk reactions, which are often abandoned to rot.
This firefighting approach, the president of the institution noted, results in spiraling costs, draining the country’s meagre revenues and burning taxpayers’ money.
“Basically, I can say in Ghana, we don’t do project management. We do the firefighting approach. If you look at the projects that go on in the country, most of the projects are not properly managed, and we have a lot of abandoned projects,” he stated.
To contribute to addressing this canker, the engineers’ group says the bootcamp will craft a communiqué to advise the government on how to shift away from this wasteful “firefighting” approach and embrace true project management principles, where every cedi is accounted for, every deadline respected, and every project completed.
“So we, as a group, have come to rethink and come up with a communique and advise the government on the way forward to avoid this wastage of taxpayers’ money,” Henry Kwadwo Boateng announced.
On his part, former Vice-Chancellor of the Cape Coast Technical University, Reverend Professor Joshua Owusu Okyere, emphasized the essence of proper project management principles.
For him, governments and institutions should refrain from commencing any project without a proper feasibility analysis to ascertain if the project can be completed. He cited that the Cape Coast Technical University is a living example of places where there are scattered abandoned projects wasting taxpayers’ money.
“Financiers should not embark on any projects that they cannot complete. I think that is the bottom line. Even on this campus, you will find some projects that have been initiated, but we cannot complete them. Let us wake up out of our slumber. It does not help anybody at all,” the former VC of Cape Coast Technical University insisted.
The boot camp concluded that without discipline, Ghana’s infrastructure will remain a patchwork of abandoned projects. However, with proper project management, taxpayers can finally expect results that match the money spent.
