Parliament has approved an amount of GHC250,000 each for Members of Parliament through the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) distribution formula. This allocation is intended to fund education-related projects in the constituencies of MPs.
An additional GHC150,000 has been allocated to each Member of Parliament to monitor these projects.
But former Auditor-General Daniel Yao Domelevo isn’t having any of it.
He has boldly accused the government of “looting in disguise” and questioned President Mahama’s role in the controversial move.
In a strongly worded Facebook post, Daniel Domelevo wrote, “Shocking! Is it true that individual Members of Parliament have been allocated funds to monitor GETFund projects? What happens to the monitoring units of GETFund, district assemblies, Ministry of Education, etc, responsible for that? We must prevent fruitless and wasteful spending – it is looting in disguise.”
On the floor of Parliament, Minority Chief Whip and MP for Nsawam-Adoagyiri, Frank Annoh-Dompreh defended the allocation, revealing that lawmakers lobbied for the increase.
“At the deliberations, we also suggested to the minister [finance] that there should be some re-alignment,” he said.
“Following the pressures that MPs often come under… there should be some upward adjustments… and the finance minister complied and acceded to our requests,” he noted.
The Member of Parliament for Binduri, Issifu Mahmoud, also justified the funds, though he described the amount as inadequate.
“This so-called GHC150,000 that is meant for us to do monitoring or whatever is woefully inadequate,” he told Citi TV.
“Some senior MPs even spend far more than that in a week, in a month as far as the needs of their constituency are concerned. They pay school fees, they assist people in all sectors of life in their constituencies,” he stressed.
But Domelevo isn’t convinced by any of these explanations. As Ghana’s former Auditor-General, he has long campaigned against what he sees as systemic misuse of public funds.
To him, the allocation is not just unnecessary but a duplication of effort, given that GETFund already has dedicated monitoring structures.
The controversy continues to grow as civil society groups, political observers, and taxpayers question the ethics behind the allocations.
