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Joined March 2011

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Franklin CUDJOE

@lordcudjoe

5 months ago

Kay Cudjoe writes..Step away from politics for a moment and imagine something every contemporary Ghanaian understands very well. A trotro station. Picture a big station at Circle or Kaneshie At the entrance, the station master hires a man whose job is simple. Count every trotro entering the station so the union can collect the right station fee.The man arrives with a clipboard. Every trotro that enters pays the station levy. Everything works. Years later the station master says the counting system is not strong enough. Drivers may be hiding trips. So he hires a digital counter system to track every trotro entering and leaving the station. Fair enough. Now the station has two systems checking revenue. One manual. One digital. Drivers grumble but the system works. Then one day the station master announces something shocking. He says the station will now hire another company to install an advanced camera system to count trotro movements again. The drivers ask a simple question. Why do we need a third counter? The station master says this one is very sophisticated. It will stop revenue leakage. It will make the station richer But the contract is expensive. Very expensive. So expensive that the station must pay the company the equivalent of building several new terminals. Still, the system is installed. Months pass. Drivers still pay the same station fee. No new revenue is announced. Nothing visibly changes at the station. But the company continues collecting money. Every year. For years. Soon the drivers start whispering. “Is the new camera actually counting anything we were not already counting?” Some begin to suspect the system was never about counting trotro. It was about collecting money from the station treasury. That trotro station story is almost exactly what many critics say happened with the KelniGVG contract. Ghana’s telecom industry already had systems monitoring traffic and verifying revenue. Yet government introduced another monitoring platform through KelniGVG. The project was sold as a revenue assurance system. It would monitor international calls, telecom traffic and digital usage to ensure telecom companies paid the correct taxes to the state. The problem critics raised was simple. Much of this monitoring already existed. So the question became the same one the trotro drivers asked at the station. Why build another counter for something that was already being counted? The contract was first reported around $89 million. But when the payment structure, operational costs and lifespan were examined, critics argued the real exposure to the state could reach about $178–179 million. Nearly two hundred million dollars. That is the cost of major national infrastructure. Hospitals. Highways. Universities. Yet the public has never seen a clear national report showing how much extra telecom revenue the KelniGVG system actually generated. No widely publicised independent audit. No public dashboard showing billions recovered because of the system. And so the suspicion has lingered for years. Civil society groups like IMANI Africa challenged the deal in court and raised alarms about privacy and redundancy. The courts allowed the contract to proceed.But the political and economic question never disappeared. Because the issue is not whether a contract exists. The issue is whether the contract delivered value equal to the money spent. That is why Franklin Cudjoe’s recent attack on former Communications Minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has reignited the debate. He is essentially asking the same question the trotro drivers asked at the station.If we spent almost $179 million to monitor telecom revenue, where is the proof of the extra money recovered?If the system works, show the numbers.....