A minister on a road is not a road that works
A minister on a road is not the same thing as a road that works.
Governs Kwame Agbodza, the Roads and Highways Minister, has been on a nationwide inspection tour. On Saturday he was in the Northern Region. JoyNews reports that he said the visits are not a witch-hunt. They are meant to keep projects on course.
“We don’t go around just trying to look for trouble for contractors, but indeed, many of the Big Push contractors and other contractors are doing very well.”
He also said the tours had already pushed some contractors to move faster.
That is the common-sense reading, and it sounds responsible. A minister who shows up must be more serious than a minister who does not.
The trap is treating the visit as the system.
A road does not fail because nobody important stood on it last week. It fails because the contract was weak, the inspection after the cameras left was weak, payment was late or too early, the materials were wrong, or nobody with a file and a tape measure came back when the minister had gone.
Visibility is not performance.
Three days earlier, on the 37-kilometre Wa–Bulenga Road in the Upper West Region, the same minister ordered Aschal Investment Limited back to site. JoyNews and Citi both have the order. The job was awarded in 2024. Citi reports the contractor had been off site for more than a year. Portions were already failing.
“Tell the contractor to come back to site immediately and remedy all those things. The thing is already failing. It is not rocket science, and you don’t have to be an engineer to know that what he has done will fail in no time.”
“We have no appetite for substandard work.”
That second statement is the more useful one. A failing stretch of road does not need a sermon about witch-hunts. It needs a contractor who is actually there, work that can survive a rainy season, and an agency that does not discover the failure only when the minister’s convoy arrives.
If the only time a job accelerates is when the minister is expected, then the inspection has become the product.
Invisible competence is still competence.
A road is a good road when nobody has to write about the inspection.
You do not want citizens to need a ministerial tour in order to believe the asphalt will last.
I understand the official instinct. Contractors should not be insulated from being checked. A country cannot run on that fantasy.
That part is reasonable.
The error is the leap from “we must inspect” to “therefore the inspection tour is the work.”
There is a huge difference between administering a maintenance system and making a public appearance because you believe presence will teach the contractor.
Those are not the same thing.
A functioning roads agency has schedules, independent site engineers, penalties that fire without a press statement, and payments that follow certified work rather than hope. The minister can still visit. The road should not require him.
In Ghana we are not innocent in this. We clap for the convoy. We share the video. We treat the working visit as proof that something is being done, then we are surprised when the same stretch fails in a year and another minister comes to stand on it.
Look at the results.
At some point we have to ask whether the method is working.
A functioning society cannot insulate contractors from the consequences of bad work.
It also cannot keep using the minister’s body as a substitute for the boring machinery that should have caught the failure before the cameras arrived.
Perhaps the thing we need now is not a more energetic tour.
Perhaps we need better contracts, better inspection after the convoy leaves, better enforcement, and leaders who can tell the difference between being seen on a road and building one that people can forget.
It’s about time we thought deeper.