Blame It On Sarkodie

Blame It On Sarkodie

As if the disqualification of R2Bees hit song Agyei from this year’s Vodafone Music Awards because of its risque lyrics is not enough, music producer, Mark Okraku Mantey is putting the blame partially at the doorstep of Sarkodie who featured on the song.
According to Okraku, Sarkodie, Ghana’s fastest rapper doesn’t use risque lyrics in his own songs so he doesn’t see why he should do that when featuring on someone else’s work.

Talking to Graphic Showbiz, Okraku said Sarkodie is not noted for singing profane so he was surprised he came up with those lyrics on Agyei.

“If Daddy Lumba or A.B Crenstil did that, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise but coming from Sarkodie is shocking. He would naturally not use profane lyrics in his own songs.

“Anyway, I wouldn’t put all the blame on Sarkodie. R2bees should have known better than to allow Sarkodie to use such words on their work”, he added.

However, the manager of R2bees, Ike Otoo Arhin disagrees with Mark. He said R2Bees doesn’t have a problem with Agyei being disqualified from the VGMA.

“ You see, R2bees has been able to make a very big impact with Agyei. The group did the song not necessarily targeting the Ghana Music Awards but rather coming out with something that Ghanaians will love and I think they have been able to achieve that.

“ Also, the fact that R2bees has been nominated in the other categories in the VGMA is enough to say R2bees did very well last year. I hope R2bees who have been nominated in Artiste of the Year, Best Group of the Year and Hiplife/ HipHop Artiste categories win at least two of the awards.

“As we talk now, R2bees is touring some parts of London with Agyei and would return somewhere next week” the manager told Showbiz.

On his part, a representative of Sarkodie has challenged Okraku to come again: “ Why is he picking on only Sarkodie? Nana Borro who also featured on Agyei used what I believe are more suggestive lyrics so he should leave Sarkodie alone”.

Ghanaians To Study Abroad In Petroleum Industry - Under Scholarship Packages

Ghanaians To Study Abroad In Petroleum Industry - Under Scholarship Packages

The government, in collaboration with oil extraction companies in the country, has arranged several scholarship packages for Ghanaians to pursue further studies abroad in various fields of the petroleum industry.

The initiative, according to the Minister of Energy, Dr Oteng Adjei is to build the capacity of Ghanaian nationals to achieve the desired expertise and know-how in the oil and gas industry.

Dr Oteng Adjei made this known in a speech read on his behalf by the Director of Petroleum, Ministry of Energy, Dr Paul Frempong, at the 9th quadrennial delegates’ conference of the General Transport, Petroleum and Chemical Workers’ Union (GTPCWU) of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Koforidua.

The event, on the theme “Repositioning Labour as an Equal Partner in the Oil and Gas Industry”, which was attended by representatives of workers of the union countrywide and sister unions in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, was to take stock of its activities with special regard to the oil find and plan for the future.

According to Dr Oteng Adjei, Ghana’s Jubilee Field with an expected reserve of about 800 million barrels of light crude oil and an upside potential of about 1.8 million barrels, as well as significant quantities of associated natural gas, required a local content policy for effective exploitation.

He stated that such a policy called for Ghanaians to have the required qualification and expertise in the oil and gas sector, adding that it was in that respect that the government was collaborating with companies operating in the sector for a scholarship scheme for Ghanaians to study abroad.

Dr Oteng Adjei, who cited a typical example of advance studies and mentorship programmes initiated by the Ghana National Petroleum Company/Tullow Ghana for 14 Ghanaians to study in universities in the United Kingdom, said such a scheme would in the long term provide Ghana with highly skilled workers in the industry.

That, Dr Oteng Adjei stated, would boost the oil and gas sector to generate the necessary revenue for economic growth and national development to improve the living conditions of Ghanaians.

With regard to the negative effects of oil exploration and extraction, Dr Oteng Adjei said the necessary steps were being taken.

The Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Moses Asaga, spoke on the importance of the oil and gas industry to the economy and said in line with the government’s “Better Ghana Agenda”, the Mills’ Administration was doing its best to improve the industry for the benefit of Ghanaians.

He congratulated the GTPCWU on its patriotism and maturity of leadership in dealing with the many challenges which confronted workers within the sector that ensured a peaceful atmosphere on the industrial front.

The General Secretary of the GTPCWU, Mr E. A. Mensah, said his outfit was concern about how the local content policy was being implemented.

He stated that although the policy had all that it should take for Ghanaians to participate meaningfully in the sector, its implementation had been botched with difficulties and wondered whether the provision to achieve 90 per cent local content coverage in 10 years would be achieved.

On the passage of the Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Law (E&L), Mr Mensah was not happy that it had not been done a year after the first oil was poured in Ghana and called for speedy action on the issue.

Mr Mensah, who dwelt extensively on the union’s activities, said although a lot had been accomplished, a lot more remained to be done because there were still some unfriendly management issues making it difficult for the union to operate. He, however, expressed the hope that a way would be found in the interest of the workers.

The acting General Secretary of the TUC, Dr Yaw Baah, said the TUC had, since oil was discovered in Ghana five years ago, played and would continue to play its role to ensure efficient management of the oil revenue. Apart from that, Dr Yaw Baah said the TUC would also always ensure that workers employed by the oil companies were protected with good conditions of service.

Earlier, the Deputy Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Ebenezer Okletey Terlabi, in a welcome speech expressed concern about the rate at which land was being sold to expatriates in the wake of the oil find.

According to him, the situation is worrying, since the land belonged to both the present and future generations and called on stakeholders to look into it because it had the potential of threatening the security of the country. Mr Terlabi also called for adequate measures to ensure safety in the oil and gas sector.

The Technical Director of the National Petroleum Authority, Mr Isaac Tagoe, also addressed the gathering, while solidarity messages were read by representatives of sister unions in both Ghana and countries such as Nigeria and Uganda.

Crash in the Ivorian system caused country-wide power outage- GRIDCo

Crash in the Ivorian system caused country-wide power outage- GRIDCo

Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) has apologized for the loss of electrical power supply which occurred throughout the country on Wednesday, March 21.

It said the cause of the power outage was as a result of loss of a generator in the Ivorian power system which is interconnected to the Ghana system adding that the loss of the generator led to a frequency decay and instability in the Ghana power system leading to the loss of all power generators in the country.

This was contained in a statement signed by Mr Albert Kwesi Quainoo, Head of Public Relations of GRIDCo to Ghana News Agency on Thursday.

The statement said the Ghanaian and Ivorian power system were continuously interconnected to provide for a more robust system and ensure maximum benefit from the voltage support that the interconnecting line provides.

“GRIDCo further wishes to clarify that the fundamental problem with the power supply situation today is that there is not sufficient generation to meet the load on the system”, it said.

It said for reliability purpose, the generation reserve on line to meet unexpected occurrence such as Wednesday’s situation should have been 160 Megawatts (MW).

The statement said at the time of the collapse on Wednesday, the demand on the power system was 1615.7MW with the generation reserve being only 6 MW instead of the acceptable level of 160 MW.

“With the loss of generation in the Ivorian power system and the resultant automatic export of power into their system, the absence of sufficient generation worsened the frequency decay, leading to its collapse”, it said.**

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Female students sleeping in classrooms

Female students sleeping in classrooms
A total of 30 female students of the St Stephens Secondary Technical School at Asiakwa in the East Akyem Municipality, are sleeping in classrooms due to lack of accommodation.

The female students have no other option than to sleep in their classrooms in the night since the girls’ dormitory could not accommodate all the 190 female student boarders.

The students have to move their furniture outside in order to arrange their mattresses on the floor to pass the night and re-arrange them early in the morning for classes.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in an interview, Mr Amoo-Tenkorang Pinnock, the assistant headmaster, said the school was founded in 1978 as a day school and was adopted into the boarding system in 2000 to cater for students outside the community.

He said that situation had brought a lot of challenges to the school since there were no dormitories for the students and that the school had rented premises outside the school for the male students.

Mr Tenkorang said the building, which was meant for a technical block was now being used as an administrative block and that the headmaster’s office looks more of a kitchen than an office.

He said the uncompleted dining hall is also being used as a classroom for the form one students comprising of four different classes including Home Economics, Visual Arts, General Arts One and Two.

Mr Tenkorang appealed to the government and other organizations to come to the aid of the school.

In another development, the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) of the school, on Thursday presented a vehicle worth GH¢22,800 to the school to help transport teachers staying in rented premises to the school.

Receiving the vehicle, Mrs Kate Agyeman Badu, the Municipal Director of Education for East Akyem, and acting headmistress for the school, thanked the PTA for the gesture.**

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UTAG calls off strike

UTAG calls off strike
The University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) has called off its strike after an emergency National Executive Committee meeting on Thursday.

The Association withdrew its teaching services and even threatened to withdraw more services because the Government of Ghana had failed to meet the deadline of March 15 to address their concerns of nonpayment of their salary arrears.

In an interview with Citi News, the National President of UTAG, Dr Anthony Simons, said their decision to call off the strike was due to government’s quick responds to their demands.

He said: “We have restored teaching services; students can go back to class. Yesterday [Wednesday], I had a chat with Hon. [Mahama] Ayariga (Deputy Education Minister), he briefed me on what government had done so far.”

“We also made a check on what he had told us from another source and from all indications, the University of Education, Winneba, has already prepared the vouchers and then hopefully tomorrow [Friday] or Monday, lecturers there would get their money,” Dr. Simons noted.

“So we believe once one or two universities are preparing to pay what they’ve received for payment then we feel government has shown some sort of commitment and there is no need holding on to the strike action.”

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Anane’s Lover Pops Up In Woyome Saga

Alexander O’Brien, former mistress of erstwhile Minister of Roads and Transports in the John Kufour administration, Dr. Richard Anane, is said to have worked closely with embattled businessman and National Democratic Congress (NDC) financier, Alfred Agbesi Woyome.

DAILY GUIDE learnt that Alexandria O’Brien (also called Alexandra Anane at a point) allegedly played a major role in the Woyome financial engineering and financial restructuring for the controversial CAN 2008 projects which have so far spiralled into a murky GH¢51million judgment debt.

In an interview, Benjamin Kwame Tawiah, close aide to Mr Woyome, was unequivocal in the role played by Alexandra O Brien. “She was in the office of Alfred Agbesi Woyome in the USA, she was working there,” he said, adding, “She contributed immensely to the securing of all this money [the €1.2bn said to have been secured to finance all the projects for the CAN 2008 tournament but never got to Ghana]”.

According to Mr Tawiah, Alexander O’Brien worked at Alexander Van Cleef (Austro Invest’s representative in the United States), a company closely associated with Mr. Woyome. “We are looking at her expertise, we are talking about a high level, qualified lady for international business, Alexandra O’Brien of Alexander Van Cleef, that’s the lady we are talking about,” Mr. Tawiah emphasised.

Sources close to Woyome claimed that the abrogation of the financial engineering role of Mr. Woyome, in the stadium rehabilitation project of Waterville BVI in 2006, was because of the detection of the NDC financier’s alleged link with Woyome.

According to Woyome sources, all the information passed through the Enquirer newspaper in 2005 on the relationship between Dr. Anane and Alexandra was through the embattled NDC businessman.

Alexandra was allegedly quite cooperative with the Enquirer and was passing on damning information about the minister after their relationship went sour.

According to David Tamakloe, a former reporter of the Enquirer and now Editor of the Republic, and a close associate of Mr. Woyome, the Kufuor government apparently found out that Mr. Woyome had close links with the Enquirer newspaper and they consequently became suspicious.

Mr Woyome at the time was also linked to the NPP’s arch-rivals, the NDC, while pretending to be an NPP member.

Mr. Tamakloe told DAILY GUIDE that this could have been one of the underlying reasons why the CAN 2008 project involving Alfred Woyome was torpedoed by the Kufuor government in 2006.

People close to the Woyome camp have not dismissed the assertion that the relationship between Mr. Woyome, the Enquirer newspaper and Alexandra could have played a key role in the Kufuor government’s final decision even though Waterville itself conceded that it could not raise the money for the stadia project.

According to Tawiah, there were a lot of underlying currents that came into play at the time. “These are things that we would be using at the law courts, the thing is that she [Alexandra O’Brien] was working there [in Woyome’s Office] and when the time comes, she will be in town to give testimonies to this whole financial engineering thing.”

When contacted, one time Finance Minister in the Kufuor administration, Yaw Osafo-Maafo, dismissed this line of argument.

He told DAILY GUIDE that Kufuor government’s sole reason for cancelling the tender process of the 2006 stadium rehabilitation project by VAMED (which later transferred its right to Waterville BV) was pure budgetary considerations. “It has nothing to do with Woyome. People keep bringing in Woyome; Woyome had nothing to do with it, the company [that the Kufuor government was dealing with] was VAMED,” he told DAILY GUIDE in a telephone interview.

According to Mr. Osafo-Maafo, technically, there was no contract between the government of Ghana and Waterville because at no point did the government ever write an offer letter to VAMED.

Alfred Agbesi Woyome is currently on a GH¢20 million bail after he was indicted by the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) a few weeks ago for fraudulent misrepresentation.

He is being charged for falsifying documents that earned him the GH¢51.2 million judgment debt from the Mills government.

It is alleged that he knowingly connived with Waterville BVI (who claimed to have contacted some aspects of its financial engineering to Mr. Woyome for the stadium rehabilitation project) to cream off substantial judgment debt from the Mills government.

Certain government officials are said to be complicit in the payout.

Even though Waterville has denied ever benefiting from the claims of Mr. Woyome, there are documents suggesting that the company joined forces with Mr. Woyome to sue the state for damages over alleged abrogation of contract. Waterville and Woyome went into mediation with government, and per a 13th October, 2010 document, an agreed amount of €25 million was to be paid in a five-month instalment of €5 million each. Woyome and Waterville again agreed that the former would be entitled to €940,000 of every €5million paid every month. A group calling itself the Forum for Governance and Justice (FGJ) has asked the relevant authorities to bring Waterville to book. Dr. Clement Apaak, convenor of the group, told DAILY GUIDE that Andrea Orlandi, Managing Director of Waterville, should be arrested immediately.

It is unclear if Mr. Orlandi is still in the country or not.

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NEWS TODAY

Energy Minister orders probe into Nationwide Blackout

The Minister of Energy, Dr Joe Oteng-Adjei, has ordered the three electricity providers to set up a technical committee to investigate the circumstances that have led to a string of nation-wide blackouts in recent times.

The providers — the Volta River Authority (VRA), the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) — are to submit their report to the ministry within 24 hours.

They are also required to outline strategies to forestall future nation-wide blackouts.

The country has experienced three major blackouts since January this year.

Dr Oteng-Adjei told graphic.com.gh in an interview that Wednesday’s blackout was certainly worrying and, therefore, necessitated an independent enquiry to ascertain the challenge. He said, much as the government acknowledged the constraints in the power sector, total blackouts could be prevented if systems were managed effectively.

“The utility companies must be up and doing because Ghanaians are beginning to lose their patience on such incidents which are preventable,” he said, adding, “Incidents of nation-wide blackouts have security and economic implications and should, therefore, not be taken for granted.”

While using the platform to apologise to the public for the inconvenience the inaction of the three providers might have caused them, the minister signalled that people would have to suffer the consequences if it was found that the recurrence was as a result of human error.

While the VRA attributed the latest occurrence to system overload as a result of overstretched demand during peak periods, officials of GRIDCo took exception to that.

According to the Public Relations Manager of GRIDCo, Mr Albert Quainoo, preliminary investigations revealed that the recurrence was as a result of inadequate generation reserve margin to take care of emergencies in the event of collapse.

According to him, the power producer ought to make available an acceptable daily reserve of 160 megawatts, which is about 10 per cent of system demand.

He also blamed the situation on Cote d’Ivoire losing one of its generators, consequently prompting the automatic load frequency device mechanism on the transmission lines to transfer power into its systems, compelling the system trip off.

“At the time of the collapse yesterday, there were some 1,615.7 megawatts available, with a six megawatts reserve, thereby prompting the automatic supply at the time Cote d’Ivoire lost its generator,” Mr Quainoo said.

He said while last Wednesday’s incident resulted from an explosion of a circuit breaker, adequate reserves in the system would have provided some compensation by holding parts of the country on.

The nation-wide outages in recent times have seen disenchanted members of the public taking to social media platforms to vent their frustrations on all three providers.

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) earlier this month received a report from the providers on the erratic power supply after an emergency meeting to deliberate on the power supply situation.

Similar occurrences were recorded on January 28 and February 26 which officials blamed on system failure following a broken cable said to have fallen on a power generator at the Akosombo Switchyard.

They also blamed the erratic supply of gas from the West Africa, Gas Company (WAPCo) for the inconsistency in supply.

The PURC had been worried over providers’ inability to make available necessary information to consumers on their operations and charged them to ensure that consumers became a focal point in their operations.

The VRA, however, last week announced publicly an end to the month-long load-shedding exercise which was prompted by the shortfall in gas supply.

The return to normalcy was, however, shortlived, as consumers and the public had, over the past days been subjected to sleeping in the dark.**