The Member of Parliament for Tamale North, Alhassan Suhuyini, has described the recently-inaugurated project in the Northern Regional Capital, Tamale as a flyover and not an interchange as claimed by the government.
Mr. Suhuyini said several debates had established that the infrastructure was not an interchange as suggested earlier.
He said the government had subsequently also admitted that the infrastructure does not qualify as an interchange.
“As to whether it is an interchange or a flyover, that debate has been settled. You saw desperate attempts by people in government to christen it an interchange, but in their write-up and even in the President’s speech where they call it an interchange, they proceed to define it, with the admission that it is a bridge. They say it is an interchange but in their description, it was a flyover.”
Justifying his claim, Mr. Suhuyini said the project had become a “source of traffic” given that the “roads beneath the flyover are so narrow that you cannot have two vehicles [using them].”
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo recently inaugurated the infrastructure at a ceremony in Tamale.
Mr. Suhuyini said some members of the Minority could not honor an invitation to the inauguration ceremony because they received a tip-off about the government’s intentions to lay the Electronic Transfer Levy for approval on the same day.
“An invitation was sent by the Minister of Roads and Highway and the same was sent to my colleague in Tamale Central, the Minority, and A.B.A Fuseini to be part of the commissioning ceremony.”
“Only for us to hear the night before that there was an attempt by the government to introduce the E-levy in Parliament and take a decision on it that day. We got that from our own sources.”
The project is an integral part of comprehensive measures by the Akufo-Addo government to address the issues of congestion in urban centers and to help improve travel times on major arterial roads.
The project falls under the $2 billion SinoHydro Master Project Support Agreement.