Last Friday, the Chief Corporate Communications Officer of the Jospong Group of Companies, Sophia Kudjordji, and I clashed on TV3 on a previous contract awarded to the Jospong Group.
I had been invited to appear on the Ghana Tonight programme and explain why I insisted that the Zoomlion with the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) contract should be discontinued and not reviewed, as the acting YEA CEO, Malik Basintale, had suggested.
At some point, the host announced that Sophia Kudjordji wanted to react to my claims. When the host asked her to point to any fact I had stated that was untrue, she couldn’t. She instead tried to rubbish my investigations. In particular, she attacked my investigation into a shady contract the government awarded to five Jospong companies in November 2016.
“Manasseh claims he did something. My dear, he did nothing. This armchair kind of desktop investigation that you do…, that you have people behind you to do what you do…” she said.
When the host asked whether the figures and incidents I had mentioned concerning that deal actually happened, she said, “I will not glorify a so-called investigation that did not materialize into anything. You sat in your office, and thought that this is a contract you have seen…”
In this short write-up, I will show you, with evidence, how the investigation unfolded and a video excerpt of the story. The contract, worth $74 million, was cancelled after my investigation. The $14 million component of this contract was what generated the debate on the TV3 programme. Here are the facts of the investigation:
- The $74 million contract was awarded to the Jospong Group to supply 1,000,000 24-litre waste bins and 900,000 disposable bin liners. The contract was awarded in NOVEMBER 2016.
2. In DECEMBER 2016, the Chairman of the Jospong Group, Joseph Siaw Agyepong, made a public announcement at the 10th anniversary durbar of Zoomlion in Accra to thunderous applause. “We were the first company to distribute FREE waste bins to households in Ghana. Currently, we have distributed 200,000. Our vision is to distribute one million FREE waste bins to all households in the year 2017,” he told the audience, which included President John Mahama, some of his ministers of state, and Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, who rallied “politicians in government and opposition” to support Zoomlion’s business.
(Don’t proceed without getting the grand deception here, much of which you hear in the media about the benevolence of the Jospong Group, when the state is funding such outrageous deals.)
3. The cost of the one million waste bin was $60 million, and the 900,000 pieces of disposable bin liners were awarded at a cost of $14,040,000. (For the avoidance of doubt, the bin liners are the polythene bags used to line the waste bins and thrown away after each use.)
4. The contract was sole-sourced and shared among five companies of the Jospong Group, owned by Joseph Siaw Agyepong. Universal Plastic Products and Recycling Company Limited, Yeeco Plastics Ghana Limited, JSA Logistics Limited, and Able Plastic Recycling Limited were to supply the one million waste bins, while Meridian Waste Management Services Limited was to supply 900,000 bin liners.
(In a related fraudulent fumigation contract that was awarded to 11 companies of the Jospong Group, I had discovered that Meridian Waste got the contract three months before the company was registered.)
5. A letter written by the Chief of Staff at the Office of the President, Julius Debrah, had directed the Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, Collins Dauda, to procure the waste bins. The PPA granted approval for sole sourcing using urgency as the reason.
6. I drove someone to Universal Plastic Product and Recycling Ltd, a subsidiary of the Jospong Group named in the contract, to request an invoice for 500 pieces of 24-litre waste bins and 500 pieces of bin liners to match. When the source returned, I asked him to go back and get them to calculate the unit price per piece of the bin liners, which they did with a pen on the company’s letterhead.
7. The Jospong Group quoted the price of each bin liner at 98 pesewas. To get whole numbers, let’s round it up to GHS1, or $0.23. This means the Jospong Group was selling to me at $0.23 a piece but quoting to the government at $15.6 per bin liner. I was buying 500 pieces, and the government was buying 900,000 pieces.
8. Using the price quotation my source got from the Jospong company 900,000 bin liners the government procured should have cost $207,000, but the cost was $14,040,000 on the contract documents.
9. This was an overcharge of $13.8 million.
10. I also took the proforma invoice from the same Jospong company for the waste bins. The company quoted GHS150 as the unit price of a 24-litre waste bin. An earlier contract awarded by the Local Government Ministry for the supply of waste bins had charged GHS 15 to transport each waste bin. So, I added GHS20 to the Jospong invoice price, making each bin liner GHS170 or $39.5. But the Jospong companies quoted $60 to the government. I was procuring 500 pieces, and the government was procuring 1,000,000 pieces.
11. Going by the quotation I received form the Jospong Group, the cost of the waste bins to the government should have been $39.5 million, and not the $60 million quoted in the contract.
12. This was an overcharge of $20.5 million.
13. Together with the overcharge in the cost of the bin liners, the $74 million contract for the waste bins and bin liners was overpriced by $34.3 million.
14. The worst part of this scandal was that the government did not need the waste bins. How did I know this? I travelled to 53 metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies in all 10 regions of Ghana at the time. I saw thousands of waste bins, which the same ministry that awarded the $74 million had procured earlier. The bins were left at the mercy of the weather to deteriorate. The assemblies said the rural communities did not generate much waste, so they used the bins to store water, so they stopped distributing the bins. In the urban centres, residents often received free bins from waste management companies, which recovered the cost through the collection of their waste at a fee.
15. Further investigation revealed that the Ministry of Local Government had procured 150,000 waste bins two years earlier from Qualiplast, a leading plastic manufacturing company in Ghana. The company supplied 100,000, and the ministry could not distribute them. When the company wrote to the ministry to ask when it should supply the remaining bins, the Ministry asked Qualiplast to wait until it finished distributing the 100,000 pieces. At the same time, the ministry placed an order for One Million bins from the Jospong Group at the inflated price quoted above.
16. Before Julius Debrah became the Chief of Staff at the Office of the President, he was the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development when the previous waste bins were procured. He was succeeded by Collins Dauda, the minister Chief of Staff’s letter directed to procure the one million waste bins. The procurement was said to be a sanitation measure to prevent the spread of cholera.
17. I met both Mr. Julius Debrah and Collins Dauda for their comment, but they declined to officially comment. The Jospong Group also failed to comment, but when the first part of the story went online, the company issued a press statement threatening to sue if Joy FM, where I worked, did not retract the story and apologise within seven days. We did not retract and apologise and they did not sue.
(In fact, Joseph Siaw Agyepong had sued me for defamation earlier that year but ran away from the case when I filed my defence.)
18. The Jospong Group confirmed the facts of my story, but explained that the government was not paying cash upfront, the reason the prices in the government contract were different from the cost at which they sold to the public. Sophia Kudjordji, who signed that press statement as Sophia Lissah, repeated this explanation on TV3 last Friday. She claimed the company was to be paid within a period of two years of the supply, but another letter from the Chief of Staff to the Ministry of Finance had requested a provision to be made in the 2017 budget for the waste bins contract.
19. The good news is that the NDC lost the 2016 election contract was cancelled a year after I published the story as part of the three-part series titled “Robbing the Assemblies.” I published the story nine months after the award of the contract, but the Jospong Group had not supplied a single piece of bin liner or waste bin.
20. The Financial Forensic Unit of the Police CID investigated this scandal and the fumigation scandal and built dockets for the Attorney General, who had asked for the investigation and asked that I work with the police. Like many scandals involving the Jospong Group, there was no prosecution.
21. So it is not true that this investigation was armchair or without impact, as Sophia Kudjordji claimed on TV3. By visiting assemblies nationwide, I proved the contract was needless, as thousands of waste bins were wasted. I also proved the inflation of the contract.
