An opposition legal figure has called for judicial intervention to halt questionable road contracts before public funds are disbursed, as the Big Push procurement controversy deepened on Saturday with fresh accusations that the Roads and Highways Minister made false statements on the floor of Parliament.
Ross Osei Owusu, a private legal practitioner and member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Legal Directorate, told Asaase Radio’s The Forum on Saturday that the scale of sole-sourced contracts under the Big Push programme had moved beyond a policy dispute into territory that warranted court scrutiny. He urged civil society organisations, opposition parties, and the parliamentary Minority to consider seeking injunctive relief to stop funds from being disbursed on contracts whose procurement basis remained legally questionable.
“I think it’s about time some of us take the next step to avoid some of these moneys from being spent before we come to make noise about it,” he said, framing judicial action as a preventive accountability tool rather than a retrospective one.
Osei Owusu also levelled a direct political charge at the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), arguing that its current conduct contradicted commitments made by its own senior figures while in opposition. He cited public statements by National Communications Officer Sammy Gyamfi and Member of Parliament Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, both of whom had previously condemned sole sourcing and pledged to reform it, as grounds for holding the party to a higher standard. “We say one thing in opposition and when we come to power, we forget what we said,” he stated.
He further questioned whether specific contracts met the conditions for sole sourcing under Section 41 of the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), which permits non-competitive procurement only in narrowly defined circumstances. He singled out an alleged GH¢11 million contract awarded to Stamboubou, questioning whether it lawfully satisfied those criteria.
The sharpest escalation of the day came from Kwaku Krobea Asante, Programme Manager for the Independent Journalism Project at the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), who directly accused Roads and Highways Minister Kwame Governs Agbodza of fabricating figures in Parliament. Krobea Asante said that after The Fourth Estate published its investigation, the minister rushed to post 54 contracts on the ministry’s website as a rebuttal but omitted the procurement type for each contract.
When The Fourth Estate analysed the minister’s own published list, 47 of the 54 contracts, representing 78 percent, were found to have been awarded on a sole-source basis. “It has become extremely dangerous that a minister of state can stand in front of parliament and tell these type of lies,” Krobea Asante said, adding that his organisation would continue releasing data as the investigation advanced.
The Big Push programme is expected to involve total public investment of approximately GH¢50 billion, as outlined by President John Dramani Mahama in the 2026 State of the Nation Address (SONA). The Fourth Estate’s original investigation, based on Right to Information (RTI) data from the Ghana Highways Authority (GHA), found that 81 of 107 contracts, valued at over GH¢73 billion, were awarded through sole sourcing.
