Government working to retrieve SADA funds

The Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) says government is seriously working through the Attorney General's (AG) Department to retrieve with interest, its funds spent on various projects.

Angelina Mornah Domakyaareh, SADA Board Chairperson, said the AG's Department was negotiating with the various partners involved on the terms of the refund; and that the Bank of Ghana was now working out the interest rates due.

She assured Ghanaians that under the new Board, there would be openness and transparency in the activities of SADA.

“We acknowledge as a new Board that SADA had had some image problems in the past. We may call that failings; it is a human institution, but we the new Board having accessed the situation, we acknowledge that even though there has been some failings, SADA has not failed,” Domakyaareh, stated in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at the press launch of the 2015 Engineering Week Celebration and the SADA Business and Investment Forum in Accra

She said: “The previous Board had done some good things; we are going to continue and build on them. The challenges that they faced and could not overcome; we have the benefit of hind-sight to be guided by that. It is not our intension to repeat the short falls that plagued the old Board.”

The Chairperson said: “So based on that we are refocusing SADA's mandate from direct implementation which the institution is not matured yet to do, to the other core mandates which have been given to SADA by the same act of coordinating, collaborating and facilitating development activities in the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone of Ghana.”

She explained further that by doing so the Authority would be getting the maximum impact from its activities.

On the way forward, the Chairperson said SADA is a national agenda; coordinating a comprehensive development agenda for five regions - Northern, Upper East, Upper West, the northern parts of the Brong Ahafo and Volta; representing the Northern Half of Ghana.

She, therefore, urged the private sector and major local and international investors and development partners to support SADA's development agenda for the benefit of all Ghanaians.

She described the collaboration of SADA with the Ghana Institute of Engineers as very pivotal in fulfillment of the Authority's mandate.