24/04/2025
Malik Basintale, Please, Don’t Push This Thievery!
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Dear Malik Basintale,
I write to appeal to you on behalf of the youth of Ghana, not to sign a new contract with Zoomlion. I'm referring to the contract that allocates 850 cedis per month to the sweepers, but stipulates that 600 should go to Zoomlion while the sweepers go home with 250 cedis a month. Don’t resurrect that deal, please.
In my 2019 book titled "The Fourth John: Reign, Rejection & Rebound," I said that whenever “Zoomlion is involved, government officials [from the presidency to the district chief executives] act without consulting their brains.”
Yesterday, I said that whoever signs a new contract with Zoomlion to manage the sweepers is either a thief or a fool.
You are the CEO of the Youth Employment Agency. Your predecessor, Kofi Agyapong of the NPP, resisted the board and went all the way to the presidency. They failed him, but before he left office, the contract had expired, and he wrote to Zoomlion to notify the company to stop work. So, since September 2024, Zoomlion has no contract with the YEA.
If any contract is signed, you will be held responsible. I appeal to you and young NDC politicians like Osman Abdulai Ayariga and Eric Edem Agbana to act in the interest of the youth. Zoomlion has many obscene contracts across all the assemblies in Ghana. The cleaners’ deal is just one of them and it stinks to the heavens. Don’t allow it, please.
Here are the reasons you should not sign a new contract:
1. In September 2022, the Chief Executive Officer of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Elizabeth Sackey, wrote to the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) to seek answers about the sweepers the YEA allocated to the AMA through Zoomlion because the assembly did not find the sweepers and had to use its own resources to employ people to sweep the markets. Her predecessor, Mohammed Adjei Sowah, complained about Zoomlion’s sweepers. Here are the facts about the YEA contract with Zoomlion.
2. The YEA has a contract with Zoomlion (since 2006), which states that Zoomlion should manage the cleaners and sweepers of all the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana.
3. The contract says the YEA and the MMDAs should employ the cleaners and give them to Zoomlion to manage.
4. But, as the AMA letter shows, the MMDAs and the YEA do not know the number of cleaners managed by Zoomlion across the country. The government pays Zoomlion in Accra based on the claim of numbers Zoomlion presents for payment. For a long time, the claim has been that 45,000 people are doing the work. The government does not know and cannot verify this figure, but they pay Zoomlion.
(I challenge any government official from Mahama’s first term, Akufo-Addo’s first and second term and now to own up if they can verify the figure Zoomlion presents for payment.)
5. Per the last contract, Zoomlion is paid 850 cedis per cleaner, but the contract says Zoomlion should pay each cleaner 250 cedis and keep 600 cedis as fees. The cleaners have no benefits such as transportation, health insurance or retirement package. If they fall ill battling the filth in our gutters and markets, they're on their own.
6. That's not all the woes these miserable cleaners go through. A letter I intercepted in 2024 showed that Zoomlion has not paid these cleaners for more than one year, even though the company claims the high fees and interest it charges the government are because it pre-finances the payment before the government pays later.
7. Because the slave wage of 250 cedis ($17) a month is too low and is not always paid, most cleaners do not go to work, as evidenced in the letter from the AMA Chief Executive.
8. The Zoomlion CEO, Elder Jospeh Siaw-Agyepong of the Church of Pentecost, told parliament yesterday that the cleaners work for a maximum of four hours a day, six days a week. How many hours do the cleaners in our various offices work in a day? And if someone’s work is worth 250 cedis a month, why must the supervisor pay 600 to manage the worker? (45,000 workers in all)] And why do our MPS and ministers pay them less than the minimum wage?
9. In 2018, the YEA CEO, Justin Frimpong Koduah (the current NPP General Secretary), conducted a head count and concluded that the number of cleaners was far lower than what Zoomlion presented for payment. At a press conference in Accra, he said Zoomlion failed to produce its payroll to back its claim of managing 45,000 sweepers. He announced that the contract with Zoomlion would be discontinued, but that did not happen. The government continued to pay Zoomlion even though the company failed to authenticate the numbers.
10. In 2022, the AMA CEO wanted the list of the cleaners working in her metropolis, based on which money is deducted from her Common Fund at source and paid to Zoomlion.
11. The YEA, which signed the contract with Zoomlion and is supposed to recruit the cleaners for Zoomlion, told the AMA CEO that it did not know the number of cleaners being managed by Zoomlion, but it continues to pay Zoomlion based on the number Zoomlion presents. How do I know this?
12. The October 13, 2022, board minutes of the YEA capture the frustration of the YEA CEO, Kofi Baah Agyepong, who wanted the contract with Zoomlion terminated. In the board minutes, the YEA CEO is quoted as confessing that the YEA could not respond to the AMA CEO because the YEA did not know the people who were supposed to be working in the AMA area.
13. The board minutes said:
"The CEO further stated that management does not have the data to authenticate any claims from the service provider [Zoomlion], including the number of beneficiaries at post and working. Hence, when the Accra Metropolitan Assembly requested information on beneficiaries working in the metropolis, management could not provide them with the same. The CEO mentioned that this occasioned a meeting with the regional minister, who raised further issues with the quality of work done in Accra city and its environs. The CEO stated that management has the capacity to manage the sanitation [module] if given the opportunity."
14. In 2017, I produced a documentary titled "Robbing the Assemblies". I revealed that the assemblies had resorted to employing their own sweepers to clean the markets and paying them, even though their Common Fund was being used to pay Zoomlion for the non-existent cleaners in their areas.
15. This means that because of the low wage of 250 cedis a month, which can be in arrears for more than a year, many of the supposed sweepers managed by Zoomlion have left the job. But Zoomlion continues to receive payment for managing them. And the assemblies, which are already paying Zoomlion for this service, will have to incur additional costs to clean their streets and markets. If this is not robbing the state to pay a shady company, what is it?
16. President John Dramani Mahama knows about this theft because when I first revealed details of this scandal in 2013 as part of my GYEEDA investigations, he was the President of Ghana. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the NPP said at the time that President Mahama could not cancel fraudulent deals such as this because he was personally benefitting from it. The Akufo-Addo administration escalated the shady deals to Zoomlion when he won the 2016 election and got into office.
17. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been consistently writing about this since 2013. The last CEO of the YEA in the Akufo-Addo era, Kofi Agyapong, wanted this deal canceled, and I was told the Local Government Minister, Martin Agyei-Mensah Korsah, was not happy about the contract.
18. As revealed in my book, "The President Ghana Never Got", the YEA CEO appealed to top forces in the Akufo-Addo administration, including the presidency, to help him discontinue this brazen theft of our money, but he did not get any support.
19. In 2022, the CEO did not get the backing of the YEA board, led by Anita K**i Boateng. She is the wife of Rev. Victor K**i Boateng/ Mr. Kwabena Adu Gyamfi.
20. In September 2024, the contract expired and the board wanted to renew it but the CEO stood his ground. He notified the board and wrote to inform Zoomlion that the contract had expired and should be suspended.
21. As of the time the NPP left office, the obscene contract with Zoomlion was no longer in existence. If any contract is signed, it will be signed by the New CEO of the YEA, Malik Basintale.
22. I call on Malik Basintale to ask the assemblies to supervise the sweepers. The waste management departments of the assemblies have more qualified staff and numbers than the Zoomlion district officers.
23. Sanitation became a problem because the government awarded many contracts to Zoomlion at the assembly level. Even the “nsamansaman” concept died because the government handed that contract to Zoomlion as sanitation guards under the same arrangement as the sweepers.
24. I don't write this because I hate Joseph Siaw Agyepong, the Zoomlion CEO, who is a respected elder of THE CHURCH OF PENTECOST. The poor sweepers should not be treated like slaves. And the assemblies, which are paying for their streets and markets to be cleaned, should not use their meagre resources to employ additional sweepers because those managed by Zoomlion have left their posts, but the company continues to get paid.
25. I have evidence and documents to back what I’ve written, including video documentaries.
26. President John Mahama and his administration cannot be taken seriously if they supervise fraudulent deals like this.
27. Mr. President, let us call you John Ayebio, not John Ababio.
Written by Manasseh Azure Awuni
