Adjei-Mensah Korsah denies being part of YEA board decision on Zoomlion Contract

Local Government Minister, Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah has denied his involvement in the agreement to increase the management fees of Zoomlion.

Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah made this known when he reached out to Manasseh Azure whose book mentioned him as one of the board members who approved the fees that the Chief Executive Officer opposed for the Youth Employment agency.

Manasseh Azure who made the position of the Local Government Minister known said even though he Minister has requested the minutes of the said meeting that approved the management fees of zoomlion, he insist he was not part of the decision making.

Read Manasseh Azure’s Post Below

Following my recent post on the CEO of a state agency who fought and lost the battle to stop a corrupt deal, the Minister for Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development, Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, has reached out to say that he did not attend the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) board meeting and could not have supported the decision. (He was a deputy minister at the time and was part of the board.)

He said he had requested and seen the board minutes I referenced but said he did not attend the meeting as was captured by the YEA. I have reached out to the YEA, but I’m yet to receive an official response on the matter.

The minutes said the decision was reached by a majority decision. It recorded three board members as opposing the decision to increase management fees for Zoomlion Ghana Limited.

The CEO of YEA, Kofi Baah Agyepong, is recorded as boycotting the subcommittee that discussed the upward adjustment of fees because he was vehemently opposed to it. Two other board members—Vincent Ekow Assafuah (Tafo Pankrono MP) and Lawrencia Ahema Adams—also opposed “the upward revision of the contract fees and insisted their objection be on record,” according to the board minutes.

Mr. Adjei-Mensah Korsah, however, insists he was not part of the meeting as claimed in the official record of proceedings.

BACKGROUND

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Since 2006, all cleaners of markets, drains and public spaces in the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) of Ghana have been managed by Zoomlion through a shady contract Zoomlion has with the YEA.

Money is deducted from the MMDAs’ share of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) in Accra and paid to Zoomlion, so whether the work is done or not, the assemblies cannot hold Zoomlion accountable. The money is paid in Accra, and they have no control over the company.

The YEA, which has a contract with Zoomlion also lacks control over the company because the payment is not done by the YEA. The YEA does not even have records on the 45,000 persons Zoomlion claims to have engaged based on which it is paid every month. The assemblies also don’t have records of the persons who are supposed to clean their districts, for which reason money is deducted from their Common Fund and paid to Zoomlion.

In 2022, when this contract came up for revision, the government had allocated 600 cedis to each sweeper per the contract. The contract said Zoomlion should be paid 420 cedis a month per cleaner as management fees while each sweeper took 180 cedis per month.

In the 2022 proposed increment, which the three board members opposed at the October 13, 2022 board meeting, the total allocation per person was to be 850 cedis per month, an increment by 250 cedis.

Out of this 250 cedis, the sweepers who were getting 180 cedis per month would receive only 70 cedis increment, while Zoomlion, which was already taking 420 cedis from the 600 cedis allocation per month, would receive 180 cedis from the 250 cedis increment.

This means out of the 850 cedis allocated to each sweeper or cleaner per month, Zoomlion would receive 600 cedis per person and each of the sweepers would be paid 250 cedis per month.

The CEO of YEA, Kofi Baah Agyepong, felt that the support of two other board members—Vincent Ekow Assafuah and Lawrencia Ahema Adams—was not enough to stop the deal, which the NPP had described in November 2016 as fraudulent.

He appealed to the Minister of National Security to intervene. (The YEA was set up in 2006 under President Kufuor after the National Security Secretariat advised that youth unemployment was becoming a national security threat to Ghana.) Mr. Kofi Agyepong also went to see Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, who helped him to get audience at the presidency to stop the deal.

Despite his efforts, the deal was passed and, as we speak, the sweepers are paid 250 a month from the total allocation of 850, while Zoomlion takes 600 cedis per sweeper per month.

This means Zoomlion receives about 20 million cedis every month from managing this contract. I’ve also been told by sources in the YEA that the government pays interest on loans Zoomlion claims to contract to run its operation of the contract.

Meanwhile, the poor sweepers are paid only only 250 cedis ( $17) a month, which is below the minimum wage set up by the government. And they sometimes work close to a year without receiving payment.

Apart from my campaign on this unconscionable contract since 2013, the NDC government under John Mahama set up a committee, which found serious issues with the contract. In the Akufo-Addo era, Justin Frimpong Koduah (the current NPP General Secretary) conducted due diligence on the contract in 2018 and found many anomalies with Zoomlion’s claims. He announced at a press conference that the contract would be discontinued and subjected to open competitive tendering, but it did not happen.

On separate occasions, two NDC MPs, Dr. Kwabena Donkor and Haruna Iddrisu, have raised the issue of slave wages to the cleaners in Zoomlion arrangement on the floor of Parliament, but nothing happened even after Speaker Bagbin tasked a committee to investigate and report to the House.

But there are more heartbreaking details to this contract than the slave-like treatment of cleaners in Ghana.

That’s a story for another day.

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