Gabby condemns minority's walk out on STX debate

By Samuel Osei/Citifmonline.com | Wed 04th August, 2010 13:04 GMT

Gabby Otchere Darko - Executive Director, Danquah Institute

The Executive Director of the Danquah Institute and ardent critic of the controversial STX Housing deal between the governments of Ghana and Korea, Gabby Asare Otchere Darko has condemned the Minority’s walk out ahead of parliament’s approval of the deal on Tuesday night.
The deal which had sparked long running controversies on the nation’s airwaves and among stakeholders, policy and civil society groups was finally approved by the legislature amidst protests and eventual walk out by the Minority.
The Minority in walking out of the House claimed the Majority side was perpetuating an illegality, citing amongst other things, the pendency of a judicial decision on a lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court by the Convention Peoples Party Youth Organizer, Mr. Kwabena Bomfeh against Parliament and the Attorney General over the STX Housing deal.
Gabby Asare Otchere Darko, has since its introduction maintained a strident opposition to the deal describing it, among other terms, as a “bad and very disturbing deal.”
He had consistently shared the Minority’s position that the cost of constructing each of the 30,000 housing units was expensive and that local contractors could have done the same job at a cheaper cost.
However on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, August 4; hours after parliament approved the deal, Gabby sounded unenthusiastic about the Minority’s walk out ahead of parliament’s approval of the deal.
“I’m not particularly fond of boycott. If it’s just really as a sort of registering a protest, to me it’s fine…but I think really it’s not a good way to state your position to a project that actually requires your intellectual input whether for or against, because at the end of the day you may issue press statements but the most endurable, sort of historical tabloids of what happens is hansard.”
Gabby Asare Otchere Darko, still maintained however that the STX deal was a “rip off.”
“…It’s a big joke, we are doing the drawings, we are going to build, and provide a guarantee for the loan and we are giving them an extra 260 Million, which we wouldn’t have done if we had used Ghanaians or  if we had gone somewhere else instead of Korea but we had to do it. So why then do we have to do it?” He queried.

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