The Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Sulemana Braimah, has detailed the methodology behind The Fourth Estate’s investigation into procurement practices under the government’s Big Push road infrastructure programme, saying the data analysis was grounded in official government records and clear filtering criteria.
Speaking on TV3’s Keypoints, Braimah said the inquiry was not speculative but was driven by specific concerns already circulating in the public domain. “The purpose for our request was to verify claims that a predominant part of these projects are being done through sole sourcing,” he stated.
He explained that The Fourth Estate obtained records from two sources. The data used for the report was supplied directly by the relevant ministry and clearly labelled as the Big Push master register. The organisation also obtained data from the Ghana Highway Authority (GHA).
Braimah said the team requested specific contract details to support its review, including the name of the contractor, the project, date of award, procurement method, contract sum, and expected completion date.
To ensure the analysis reflected only contracts under the current administration, eight projects were excluded. “Eight of them were clearly marked as ongoing, with award dates in 2022, 2023 and 2024,” he explained, adding that those awards predated the present government and were therefore removed from the dataset.
After that exclusion, the ministry’s list was combined with additional entries, including three feeder road projects and 16 urban roads, leaving a total of 107 contracts for assessment. The analysis was then limited to contracts awarded between August 2025 and February 2026.
The findings were stark. “Out of the 107, 81 were done through sole sourcing,” Braimah said. “That is about 76 percent, which confirms the claims that most of these projects are being sole sourced.”
The MFWA said it deliberately excluded ongoing projects inherited from the previous administration, focusing solely on contracts awarded under the current government to avoid misinterpretation.
The report sparked widespread public debate, prompting President John Dramani Mahama to announce that his office had requested the full report from The Fourth Estate for a comprehensive review of the allegations.
Roads and Highways Minister Governs Kwame Agbodza has disputed the findings, telling Parliament that only 44 percent of all major contracts under the Big Push initiative were awarded through sole sourcing, and that over 400 contracts were processed through open competitive bidding.
Braimah maintained that the foundation worked strictly with what government agencies provided. “We wanted to verify the claims using official data, not speculation,” he said. “When an initiative is taking significant public resources, it is important that such questions are asked.”
