Samuel Atta Akyea
The Minister-designate for Works and Housing, Samuel Atta Akyea, has stated that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government will quickly complete the affordable housing projects started by the previous Kufour administration because it is ‘their pet project.’
Presently, the Kofordua and Tamale projects are in limbo but the Minister-designate who appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament last week said the government will quickly seek private partnership to complete all the abandoned affordable housing projects to help reduce the housing deficit in the country.
He said currently the housing deficit stands at 1.7 million housing units and many more Ghanaian workers are finding it difficult to build their own houses because of the low levels of income.
He told the Appointments Committee that would convince Cabinet to complete those houses before new housing projects are started.
According to the Minister-designate, a National Housing Fund, as proposed under the new  National Housing Policy, would quickly be set up to provide long-term financing for both investors in the sector and home buyers.
He said his ministry will also look at the possibility of leveraging the Housing Fund to establish a bank for the housing sector, which he said would inject professionalism into the administration of the fund.
On rent advance, the Minister-designate said an emergency bill would be brought to parliament for the people’s representatives to decide whether rent advance should be charged or not.
On his vision to permanently address the perennial flooding in Accra and other cities, he said he would pursue critical storm drainage projects in all cities susceptible to flooding.
He mentioned in particular that he would ensure that the Conti Project, approved by the previous administration to solve the Accra floods problem but never implemented would be completely implemented to address the problem of floods in Accra.
The Minister-designate for Employment and Labour Relations, Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, on his part, said that he would wean off the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) from the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations to make the regulatory body absolutely independent.
He said he would also pursue ongoing processes to get the 2nd Tier pension referred to workers to manage.
Explaining further, the Minister-designate said he would first assess the magnitude of the problem and the nature of unemployment in the system before undertaking demographic analysis of the problem in order to identify the classes of unemployment and then implement employment programmes in the country.
He added that some of the unemployed graduates could be trained in cooperative skills and later assign to public sector agencies such as MASLOC to ensure optimal utilisation of the loans.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr