Audio Attachment:Listen to Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia at the Peduase Valley Resort. |
Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has described former President John Dramani Mahama as clueless and someone "parroting propaganda" after he (Mahama) labelled the recently launched National Digital Property Addressing System (NDPAS) as a "419 scam".
"When I read his reasoning for such a description, it was evident to me that he has no clue about what he was talking about and was just engaged in parroting propaganda. I actually had a good laugh. Let me therefore take this opportunity to educate him and others who may think like him about Ghana’s landmark digital property addressing which has been achieved in less than one year, something his government could not do in eight years!" Dr Bawumia said.
He was reacting to an allegation by Mr Mahama on Sunday, 5 November that the Vice-President brought embarrassment to President Nana Akufo-Addo by having an already-existing digital addressing system developed for $2.5million by local IT firm Vokacom, when same could have been freely gotten from Google on mobile phones.
The software, Ghana Post GPS was launched on Wednesday, October 18, by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to host the Digital addressing system in partial fulfillment of the government’s promise to formalize the Ghanaian economy.
Addressing party faithfuls who had gathered in Cape Coast after their unity walk, the former President asked President Akufo Addo to hold accountable those who were involved in the launch of the 'fraudulent' system which he described as a “419” scam.
“How can you launch a Google GPS system that is freely available on our mobile phone and say it is a national addressing system. It is such a pity. Why will you embarrass the president so much? You go and take a whole president to bring him to come and launch a system that is 419"
“When we talk about accountability, this is where the president should show that he is serious about corruption. Somebody must account for 15 million giving away free of charge. When I was in office, there was a bus branding incident, GH¢3.6m, a minister of state resigned because of GH¢3.6m...When you come into office and you want to cover up, you can cover up. When things happen you just refuse to investigate them. The toughness of the fight against corruption is that you are able to take action against your own people and that is what we did when we were in office. Here the NPP seems unable to take, the president seems unable to take self-action in anything.”
But in sharp response, Dr Bawumia, who laughed off the former president's claims, noted that whiles the NPP "welcome constructive criticism", it is prudent for one to "take your time to make sure you know what you are talking about otherwise you would be sadly exposed as being ignorant of simple facts as in this case."
Below is the Vice-President’s full response to Mr Mahama:
H.E Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia RESPONDS TO H.E. JOHN DRAMANI MAHAMA ON THE NATIONAL DIGITAL PROPERTY ADDRESSING SYSTEM (NDPAS).
Yesterday I read that former President Mahama described Ghana’s NDPAS as a 419 scam. When I read his reasoning for such a description, it was evident to me that he has no clue about what he was talking about and was just engaged in parroting propaganda. I actually had a good laugh. Let me therefore take this opportunity to educate him and others who may think like him about Ghana’s landmark digital property addressing which has been achieved in less than one year, something his government could not do in eight years!
I hope that in all humility former President Mahama can now accept criticism from me since by the Grace of God I have now occupied the office of Vice President of the Republic.
What is the National Digital Property Address System?
The NDPAS is a national database system that provides the digital address for every landed property in Ghana. Basically every 5x5m property has a unique digital address on the grid with region, district and postcode. Under this system, 16.1 billion addresses have been generated for the whole of Ghana. It relies on surveyed data from Lands Commission and the Latitude and Longitudes to generate postcodes and addresses for every square inch of Ghana. The NDPAS comes with the National Address Registry to keep records of all citizens on where they register as their office and residential addresses. The Platform comes with open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow third party application developers integrate into the system to be able to translate and use the digital addresses to help facilitate transactions. It is important to note that the NDPAS is independent of Google and any other mapping tool. Google will not give the postcode, region or district for a particular location for example. It will not give you a register of addresses for every user. Banks for example cannot confirm an address by going to Google maps but they can do so through the NDPAS for registered users.
It is very important that we distinguish the NDPAS from the applications that are developed to use the system. We should not confuse the system with the applications.
The GhanaPostGPS App is a tool that helps everyone easily know what their address is. It relies on the open APIs of the NDPAS to retrieve addresses for properties across the country. The app uses maps provided by Google, Openstreet, ESRI and Bing to aid in easy identification and navigation.
It is expected that many app developers will integrate their apps into the NDPAS and utilize the address system to push ecommerce and service delivery. One can see organizations such as Ghana Water, ECG, Banks, etc. developing apps using the NDPAS for their own purposes.
Uniqueness of Ghana’s Digital Address System
Many have indicated that there are other digital address systems in the world; of course but those do not detract from the fact that what we have in Ghana is something pretty special. None of the digital address systems in the world focus on local relevance in the same way that the GhanaPostGPS platform does. The GhanaPostGPS platform relies on Surveyed data to provide addresses. That means when you request your address, the platform makes reference to your district and region before determining your address, unlike other platforms that just use mathematics to calculate and assign an address.
The postcode system built into this platform utilizes the Spiral Matrix Postcode Algorithm to generate the various postcodes across the nation where the centre is postcode 0, postcode 1 is 500 meters, postcode 2 is 500m from postcode 1 going in a spiral until the entire district has been addressed with postcodes.
A digital address system complete with postcodes is pretty unique. A digital address system complete with postcodes that reference surveyed data is totally unheard of in the world! As far as I am aware, there is simply no digital address system available in the world today that uses Ghana specific Lands Commission survey data complete with postcodes. The digital address system that we have implemented is leapfrogging Ghana into the 21st century!
It is no surprise that this system came top after 28 companies (including some of the best companies in the world in this area) expressed interest in the bid process to provide a digital address system for Ghana.
COST OF THE NATIONAL DIGITAL ADDRESS SYSTEM
Ghana is undertaking a project to implement a NDPAS. The cost of the project as advertised is GH¢9.9m or $2.3 million (VAT inclusive). It should be noted that this amount is the total cost of the project, not just the app. For those like former President Mahama saying this could have been delivered for free, please take note:
1. There is a cost of the public awareness campaign to aid in the public education and awareness creation for the National Digital address system over the next 12 months. You have all seen the “Jack Where are you” billboards, internet and social media placements as well as heard the adverts on radio.
2. Infrastructure Set Up Cost – the costs of Servers (production and redundancies), firewalls, operating system and database licenses as well as support have all been included in the cost of the project.
3. Third party licensing fees. At the launch, Vokacom made it clear that the platform could run using any map provider such as openstreet and google. To present a seamless user experience, they opted to pay google for the use of their map services. The Hon. Minister of Communication, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has made it clear that the government will not be paying any more money to any mapping solutions provider when the current term expires. We are in fact working with Google, Microsoft, esri and openstreet to agree and go with one of these solutions providers.
4. The cost of physically embossing 4,000 government and other public buildings.
5. The cost of training for all staff of Ghanapost as well as other stakeholders such as NCCE across the nation is included in this cost. So far, over 800 buildings have been embossed with their digital addresses and more than 500 persons have been trained across the country. More embossment and training are ongoing.
6. The cost of over 300 smart devices equipped with the Offline version of the app are being deployed across the nation to staff of Ghanapost and other supporting agencies to assist citizens who do not have smartphones.
7. Testing, that is “ground truthing”, across the nation to give assurance of the validity of the system.
8. Intellectual property of the developers
How could anyone claim that this project could have come for free? Would the free givers have given us free public education, servers, firewalls, house embossments, training and smart devices all for free?
It is worth noting that other companies bid as high as GHS170million for this project. In fact, one of the most credible international companies that participated put in a bid for over GHS38million. The NDPAS is, therefore, value for money. Countries such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Mongolia are all implementing NDPASs similar to Ghana and none has opted for a free Google or other existing free mapping app. In fact, from the prices quoted by the international main supplier of the digital address systems all these countries have spent at least three times more than Ghana for their digital property address systems.
For former president Mahama to claim that Ghana’s NDPAS and the accompanying GhanaPostGPS app is a 419 scam demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the system. We have been witnesses to 8 years of his governance as vice president and president and we know what 419 scams look like.
The National Digital Property Address System:
• is not your 419 GH¢200 million SADA Guinea fowl and tree planting scam
• is not your 419 Smarttys Bus Branding scam
• is not your 419 $23 million runway at Kumasi Airport
• is not your 419 GH¢ 952 million GYEEDA scam
• is not the 419 $14 million mansion for the vice president
• is not the 419 GH¢657m Woyome, Waterville and other judgement debt scams
We know a 419 scam when we see one and that unfortunately was the hallmark of the administration of former president Mahama. Ghanaians will find out more soon as people are held legally accountable. With the record that former president Mahama has in the area of governance, it is incredible that he would have the effrontery to talk about “419 scams”.
We have spent $2.3 million on a NDPAS and I dare say it is money well spent for the benefit of all Ghanaians. It is not money finding itself into the pockets of a few cronies. We did not spend it on Akonfem, bus branding, over-priced mansions and contracts, ghost roads, etc. We have spent it on something productive. As a result, Ghana has an excellent digital property addressing system if former president Mahama would care to take some time and just read and learn about it. It was developed by Ghanaians and we should collectively take pride in their work and not try to pull them down.
Work is proceeding and the NDPAS will be implemented with the physical tagging of each house next year as well as the synchronization of the digital address of each property with the address on the utility bills of the property.
He should note that propaganda did not help former President Mahama when he was in government and it is certainly not going to help him in opposition. We welcome constructive criticism but before you criticize, please take your time to make sure you know what you are talking about otherwise you would be sadly exposed as being ignorant of simple facts as in this case.
Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana
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Wow this is solid reply. Good work done for the clarification and also reminding Ghanaians the corrupt and bad governance Ex-Prez Mahama left behind!
Mahama shd pls sleep. Was he not the president when they wanted to do a mobile money app for 6 billion dollars? He still thinks the year is 2016
Hahahahahah, Mahama, who doesn't know Mahama is a thieff, he is just warming himself up to come and st3al again and finish this country, Mr Rawlings said recently that there has never been a corrupted and thieff president in the world more than Mahama, he who surrounded himself with thi3v3s and corrupttt people, wish was the days of Mr Rawlings, he would have been tied up and shot , he has the gust to point to someone else as corruptttt, even your own party members (I.e Bagbin) know you are the worst corrupttt, criminal and above all the thi3fff ever happens to this country and the world at large , Democracy has safe some ***barred word*** Bastarddds
Google map could be free to use on app store but not so free for integration.. Uber pays money for using google map integration so who fed Mahama with such information.. You see why some of us in choosing these two wicked brothers would like to stick with NPP cos at least they are better than Snr Bro NDC who has wasted over 30 years of our 60 years independent doing nothing but destroying opportunities and Destinies.
Mahama is Ignoranttt or Disingenous
The comment of Former President Mahama on the introduction of Ghana Post GPS portray Mahama as either ignorance of the operation of efficient modernizer communication technological, or at best he is disingenuous. The Ghana system is good and design to provide Ghana an autonomy and control over the use of the technology in Ghana. Simple example to explain the need for Ghana to get such a facility. Almost every Ghana in USA use WatsApp, but almost all original US citizens do not use Watsapp. WatsApp provide easy communication with family and friends within differen nations. Since many of original US citizens have their family and friends within US they do not rely on WatsApp to exchange such communication because other means of communication within US is cheap effective and easy. The explanation given about the VP on matter is reasonable and more appealing than the criticism of the former President and many NDC. It looks like the VP and NPP have a wide vision for the use of this modern technology to know every citizen of Ghana. One advantage of many advance country over the third world is the use of technology which enable them to control crime to a very large level. Crime all over the world is becoming very complex. If we fail to know who is in Ghana as well as who comes or goes out in Ghana any effort and progress will be wiped out in a matter of time. May be Mahama and NDC are are very much aware of the danger the new system will present to them. As the NPP is bent to use Ghana Card which will be made very effective by Ghana Post GPS the NDC and Mahama is afraid of how much it will affect their fake electoral gains. the system will help to take away so much fraud in the electoral system perpertuated by NDC for a very long time. For me all the noiseee NDC is making about the new facility is derived from this fear. With the ability of NPP to rip off NDC in 2017 election with their technological intelligence they know the capability of NPP approach. They are crying their own crying and not for anything good for Ghana.
The National Digital Property Address System: • is not your 419 GH¢200 million SADA Guinea fowl and tree planting scam • is not your 419 Smarttys Bus Branding scam • is not your 419 $23 million runway at Kumasi Airport • is not your 419 GH¢ 952 million GYEEDA scam • is not the 419 $14 million mansion for the vice president • is not the 419 GH¢657m Woyome, Waterville and other judgement debt scams
This GPS software will destroy bawumia's presidential ambition. Alan and his group will do everything possible to support NDC to use this strongly against him. I feel sad for him, very sad. The software guys trick him and please Sir enough of the resistance. The earlier you realize the software is 419 the better for you and your career.
Awwwww Mahama, still your communicators are fooling. Indeed, u have shown that u are really a MOVIE STAR. U will collapse again after 2020 election. ***barred word***.
If software alone can cost GH¢2.5m then I don't think we have the moral right to say project of the previous government was inflated. yeeeeeeeee Ghana software 2.5 billion old ghana cedis wow. one software bawumia come again. This one dieeeeer abaaaaaaa