How Bole District Assembly wasted money on market no one wants

A 12-unit market stall project on the outskirts of Sonyo, a rural town in the Bole District of the Savannah Region, has been empty since its construction. The market, which cost GHC148,909.20 to build, is now covered with weeds and there are no signs that it will ever be used in future.

For Abdullahi (not his real name), a farmer in Sonyo, the market is a painful reminder of the assembly’s failure to prioritize the pressing needs of the community. He recently survived a life-threatening snake bite while working in his yam farm.  Abdullahi was rushed to the local CHPS compound and was told the facility lacked the anti-snake venom needed to save his life. His neighbors had to transport him over 30 kilometers to the Bole Government Hospital.

“This is the third snake bite in our village this year,” Abdullahi lamented. “If our health center had the right medicines, lives wouldn’t have been at risk like this.”

For Abdullahi and other residents, the funds spent on the idle market could have made significant difference in improving healthcare in the area.

Community needs

Community members have heavily criticized the decision to build the market stalls, pointing out that it shows how out of touch members of the assembly are.

Ibrahim Dramani, an elder in chief’s palace[AD1] [OA2] , described how residents were blindsided by the project. “One day, we just saw land being cleared and construction began afterwards,” he says. “No one asked if we even needed a market.”

He bemoaned that the market has become a white elephant as a result of the lack of consultation prior to its construction, and that money has been wasted as people fight for basic necessities.

Ibrahim Dramani is a committee member of the chief’s palace in Sonyo

“Eiiiii!” he exclaimed when he was told about the amount of money the assembly claims to have spent on the market project.

“Even that 48,000 alone can build such a structure,” he said.

“When you go there and take a picture and show it to anyone and mention that GHC148,909 was the amount spent on such a structure, no one would believe you.”

Ibrahim suggested that the assembly could have built bungalows for teachers and nurses to stay in the community and run clinic and the schools. He said the current arrangements, where nurses have to come from Bole, is not helpful and that patients are not treated when sent to CHPS facilities at night or early in the morning.

For many residents, including Adams Akwasi Hamza, the assemblyman for the Sonyo Electoral Area, who was elected after the project was awarded on contract, the market stalls were not a priority. The community had pressing needs like functioning boreholes, better healthcare facilities, and affordable medicines. He explained that at the time of the project, he was not a member of the assembly.

“They are aware that we need better healthcare, teachers’ accommodation, and reliable water sources, but they chose to build a market instead,” said Hamza, who also criticized the lack of consultation.

“The amount of the money they even mentioned, I don’t think that was the money used in constructing the place. If you see it, it doesn’t look like such money was spent there.”

The market stalls sit on a half plot of land on the outskirts of the village, with many pointing out that it is even too far from the centre of town, making it difficult for people to go there to trade.

Contract information of the Sonyo market project

The contract for the construction of the market stalls required the contractor to also put up “urinary facilities”. However, there are no such facilities at the market.

The Fourth Estate’s team discovered a site apparently designated for the urinary facility. It appeared a structure had been started but later abandoned or demolished.

MP’s response

Yussif Sulemana, the MP for Bole-Bamboi, believes that a market can empower community members economically through buying and selling.

“If the assembly wants to empower people to do that, I think it’s a good concept and we need to support it” he says.

However, he strongly criticized the approach used by the assembly. The MP noted that “any project at all that you want to do, you must first of all prioritize the needs of the people.”  

He added that stakeholder engagement is equally important.

“Even after prioritizing their needs, you will need to do what we call community engagement. And so what we are seeing with respect to the Sonyo market stalls shows there was no consultation, no stakeholder engagement,” he said.

The assembly’s failure to take these basic steps has, in his words, turned the project into “an albatross around our neck.”

According to the MP, the assembly failed to do due diligence which is why the market sits unused.

“If you ask me, the location has been a problem. It’s as if the project was just dumped on the people,” he remarked.

Mr. Sulemana who sits on the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, calls the project an embarrassment, saying, “these are basic things we should have done – prioritizing the community’s needs, consulting with them and ensuring they see value in the project”. For him, the failure to follow these steps constitutes a “waste of public resources.”

For Samata Adam and Memunatu Seidu, who both sell in the main Bole market, the sight of the vacant structure shrouded in weeds, is a daily reminder of what could have been a better-funded clinic.

“If they had asked us what we needed, we won’t mention market at all. We prefer to sell in Bole,” Samata said.

“We could have managed to use it if it was closer,” Memunatu said. “But where it is, even if you sell there, no one will come there to buy things.”

Accountability and questions of waste

The 2023 Auditor-General’s  report identified the market as a “lock-up fund,” a term used for projects that fail to serve their intended purposes. The report criticized the assembly for proceeding with the project without conducting a needs assessment or consulting the community.

The construction of the Sonyo market stalls was awarded to M/S Morasko Company Limited through a sole-sourcing process, bypassing competitive bidding. This has also raised serious questions about transparency and compliance with the Public Procurement Act, 2016 (Act 914), which discourages sole-sourcing except under exceptional circumstances.

According to Section 40(1)(b) of the Act, single-source procurement is permissible only when there is an urgent need for the service, and competitive bidding is impractical due to unforeseeable circumstances.

In this case, there is no evidence of urgency or unique circumstances justifying the sole-sourcing of the project.

Bole District Assembly’s perspective on the project

According to Adam Habib, the District Coordinating Director, the goal was to build a satellite market in Sonyo to serve as a trading hub.

“Sonyo is one of the food baskets of the district,” he said. “People travel to Bole only on Fridays for trading, so the idea was to build a market where people could access foodstuffs like yams and grains even on non-market days.”

In an interview with The Fourth Estate, he noted that the project was intended to bring economic benefits to the area by creating a central location where people could buy and sell goods.

When questioned about the community’s involvement in the decision-making process, Mr. Habib acknowledged that while key local figures, including the chief and the former assemblyman, were involved in the planning discussions, there was little engagement with the broader community.

If the ordinary people are saying they were not consulted, that one I cannot say yes or no. Because we were of the view that the former assembly member and the elders would have consulted their people,” Habib said.

Mr. Adam Habib acknowledged the importance of addressing immediate concerns like healthcare. However, he also argued that the Assembly could not just address basic needs when the market project was already part of their plan.

“It is something that was in the plan and we were to execute. If they said that they had other needs, I can’t dispute that. But that did not come to the fore,” he claimed.

Looking ahead, Mr. Habib stated that the market stalls would remain in place, and the Assembly plans to engage the community to operationalize it.

“We will engage the community to ensure they start using the facility,” Habib said.

However, with no clear plan in place to operationalize the market, it remains uncertain whether it will ever serve its intended purpose anytime soon.

For many Sonyo residents, the assembly’s failure to have a larger consultation serves as an example of how public resources may be wasted when projects are done without first addressing the community’s true needs. The market stands as an expensive, unused structure, while the people of Sonyo continue to suffer from a lack of access to better healthcare, clean water and other infrastructure they consider more necessary.

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The author of this report, Osman Abubakari-Sadiq is a Fellow of the 2024 Next Generation Investigative Journalism Fellowship at the Media Foundation for West Africa.