GBC Director-General challenges Auditor-General’s report on 2023 African Games

The Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, Prof Amin Alhassan, has challenged the 2023 African Games Auditor-General’s report findings, including allegations of engaging companies without contracts made against the state broadcaster.   

According to Prof Alhassan, the auditors did a shoddy job and ignored evidence submitted to them through management responses, resulting in a skewed report. 

The report highlighted alleged infractions, including the engagement of service providers without contracts, delayed procurement approval, the use of GBC staff for third-party contracts, an irregular training contract, and poor broadcast rights management.

However, documents The Fourth Estate has obtained show that some information submitted by the Management of GBC in response to audit queries did not reflect in the final report.

The contracts

In a February 2, 2026 query letter, auditors said GBC had engaged The Production Room (TPR), Silicon House Productions, and Broadstem Company Limited without written contracts in spite of the financial commitments involved.

The letter, therefore, directed GBC’s Director-General to, among other things, “provide documentary evidence of any contracts/agreements governing the above engagements” as well as “provide details of services delivered, acceptance documentation, and evidence of value received for each engagement.”

GBC’s February 6, 2026, response included signed contracts for all three companies.

The contracts show that while TPR was contracted on February 22, 2024, to train GBC staff to supply six high-spec laptops and editing software, Silicon House was contracted on February 22, 2024, to provide outside broadcast vans for the Games. The third company, Broadstem Company Limited, signed a contract with GBC on March 15, 2024, to provide satellite services.

Despite receiving the contracts, the Auditor-General’s report maintained that the service providers were engaged without contracts. 

The Director-General of GBC, Prof Amin Alhassan, told The Fourth Estate that the findings lacked credibility. 

“[On]the issues of the contracts, I provided them; she [lead auditor] refused to acknowledge them in the report,” Prof Amin told The Fourth Estate. “When they requested for it, we gave it to her [Jemima Arthur, lead auditor]. She signed and took it.”

Advance payment claims disputed

The Auditor-General’s letter also stated that TPR received 100 percent advance payment. But payment records reviewed by The Fourth Estate show otherwise.

The first payment, worth a little over GHS69,000 ($4,876), was made on March 22, 2024, a day to the end of the Games, while the largest payment, $52,133, was made on February 18, 2025, nearly a year after the Games.

Prof Alhassan told The Fourth Estate that the auditors assumed that the money was paid as stipulated in the very contract they failed to include in the final report.

“The game in auditing is evidence. If the evidence I submitted did not speak to the auditor’s issues, the auditor is under an obligation to discount my evidence and tell me why. But you can’t ignore it and go write some Ananse story about GBC.”

Training and laptops verified

The Fourth Estate found that although the training for some GBC crew and journalists was done, it was held online during the Games. While 19 participants were listed, the Course Lead from GBC, Emmanuel Ashley, said attendance averaged about 10 people a day because participants were also working during the Games.

At least two staff members mentioned as participants in a report submitted to the Director-General told The Fourth Estate that they were not part of the training.

Through GBC’s store voucher, dated May 6, 2025, The Fourth Estate verified that GBC received eight Dell laptops from TPR. We saw three of those laptops at the editing and digital units of the corporation. The remaining five were said to have been issued to journalists, who were unavailable at the time of The Fourth Estate’s visit.

Prof Alhassan said he found it weird that he was being surcharged for the training and for the laptops, although the auditors were provided evidence of the training programme, the laptops, and the editing software.

Broadcast rights row

The Auditor-General’s letter criticised GBC for granting broadcasting rights to DSTV’s SuperSport channels for free despite spending about $3.6 million on production.

Auditors said only two licensing deals generated revenue, bringing in $45,000. The Fourth Estate found that the national broadcasters of Botswana and DR Congo paid the money. Local and other international television stations used the feeds from the Games for free.

The auditors therefore asked the GBC Director-General to “justify the granting of free broadcast rights to SuperSport (DSTV), including evidence of approval and assessment of foregone revenue. Additionally, GBC was, among other things, asked to provide the broadcast rights marketing and pricing strategy adopted for the Games or explain its absence.” The auditors claimed that the poor handling of the broadcast rights cost the country GHS 59.4 million.

But Prof Amin said the decision was approved by Local Organizing Committee (LOC) Chairman, Dr Kwaku Ofosu-Asare, and argued that selling broadcast rights was not GBC’s responsibility.

“It was not our job to sell the rights. It’s the Ministry or LOC’s responsibility to appoint a marketing agency to sell the rights,” he said.

Contacted by The Fourth Estate, Dr Ofosu-Asare declined to comment, saying he is yet to be served with the report and that he would respond at the appropriate time.

However, The Fourth Estate found a WhatsApp conversation between SuperSport’s Head of Production, Docky Dockrat, GBC’s acting Director of Marketing, George Lomotey, and Dr Ofosu-Asare.  

From the message trail, Mr Dockrat had sent a message to Mr Lomotey saying, “My understanding is that SuperSport is being offered the All-African Games. If this is the case, we will consider it if it comes at no cost to us…”

Mr Lomotey then forwarded the message to Dr Ofosu-Asare, asking him to confirm if the signal was being given to SuperSport at no cost.

In response, Dr Ofosu-Asare said, “Yes, let’s do it.”

Staff deployment

The auditor’s letter to the state broadcaster also indicated that GBC staff performed roles that contracted service providers were supposed to handle, resulting in a loss to the broadcaster. According to the Auditor-General, the decision cost the public purse more than GHS 40.7 million.

GBC was asked to, among other things, quantify the cost of GBC staff time and resources deployed in support of the PGS and Quality Media Producciones (QMP) contracts and indicate how such costs were recovered. The Audit Service also demanded that GBC explain the deployment of GBC staff in roles contractually assigned to PGS and QMP.

Prof Amin rejected the claim, saying staff were attached to the production teams for training purposes, not as labour.

“The staff who were embedded were to learn, and that was all it was. We didn’t deploy labour, so I cannot cost it. And the imagination of the auditors was to cost something that didn’t exist,” he said. 

Delayed procurement ratification

Auditors further faulted GBC for procuring services under single-source procurement only to seek PPA ratification months after the Games had ended, and queries were raised at the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.  

Based on this, auditors asked GBC to, among other things, provide a detailed explanation for seeking PPA ratification only after the Games had ended, notwithstanding the early execution of contracts in February 2024. GBC was also directed to submit documentary evidence supporting the justification for single-source procurement for each service provider.

In response, GBC provided evidence of PPA ratification and explained that while it had engaged the LOC as far back as 2022 to initiate the required procurement of production equipment and train personnel, the discussions did not yield much, only for the corporation to be brought into the picture barely a few weeks before the games. The contract with PGS, the production company for the games, was signed just two days before the games.

However, the final report still had issues with how long it took for GBC to seek ratification at the PPA. 

Prof Alhassan explained to The Fourth Estate that the delay in ratification was because it took time to reconcile all the needed documents.

“PPA subsequently gave us an official ratification, which means that after their thorough investigation, they agreed that we acted rightly,” he stated.

He said GBC could have refused to take up the assignment because of the timing. But accepted the task for fear of public backlash and national embarrassment.

He said that given the timelines, it was nearly impossible to advertise and complete the procurement process in six weeks.

No exit meeting

Although the audit process required that the two parties—GBC and the auditors—met to clear outstanding issues from the management response, Prof Alhassan insisted that no such meeting happened.

“I challenge the Audit Service to produce minutes from the exit meeting we had before they issued the report,” he said.

He accused the auditors of using the report as an attempt to witch-hunt him.

Audit Service’s response

When The Fourth Estate sought the auditor’s response, Audit Service declined to comment.

“The report on the 13^th African Games has been duly submitted to Parliament in compliance with Article 187 of the Ghanaian Constitution,” the Audit Service’s Assistant Director of Audit/Information Officer, Frederick Lokko, said.  “The report is yet to be deliberated upon by the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, and therefore, it is deemed very necessary by the Service to allow this process to be completed; after which your request for an interview regarding aspects of the report mentioned herein can be granted.”

What was supposed to be a forensic audit of the 2023 African Games expenditure has instead become a credibility contest between GBC and the Auditor-General. It is now up to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to determine who is telling the public the truth.