Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Sulemana Braimah, has strongly defended the organisation’s work on sole-sourced road contracts under the government’s Big Push initiative, insisting the findings raise legitimate questions about transparency and consistency in governance.

Speaking on the Joy Super Morning Show, Braimah said the public debate that followed MFWA-supported investigations by The Fourth Estate is not the result of any attempt to “manufacture a scandal,” but a reflection of contradictions within the government’s own record and earlier statements on sole sourcing.

“For us to describe what has been done as a scandal or corruption scandal — nobody has even used those words,” he said. “If anybody has talked about corruption in relation to what we have put out, it is their own people. They are the ones who told Ghanaians that sole sourcing leads to stealing.”

Braimah backed his argument with examples from recent political history, noting that several senior figures in the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) had repeatedly condemned sole-sourced contracts during their years in opposition.

He cited the current Roads Minister, Governs Kwame Agbodza, who previously argued that sole sourcing inflated project costs and deprived the state of value for money.

According to Braimah, this stance shaped campaign promises in both the 2020 and 2024 NDC manifestos, where the party pledged to severely limit the practice.

“The president himself has emphasised in his State of the Nation Addresses that sole sourcing must be curtailed,” he noted.

“So if you now use the same method you criticised as a pathway to stealing, how should the public interpret it?”

The current debate was triggered after The Fourth Estate published an analysis of government-released data on Big Push roads projects.

The investigation showed that 81 out of 107 newly awarded contracts were done through sole sourcing — a figure representing more than GH¢73 billion in procurement value.

MFWA requested the data using the Right to Information Act. Braimah explained that the Ministry initially refused to release the information, prompting an appeal that eventually compelled disclosure.

“We didn’t award the contracts. We don’t supervise road projects. The data they gave us is their own data. We simply analysed what they told us,” he stressed.

MFWA said it deliberately excluded ongoing projects inherited from the previous administration, focusing solely on contracts awarded under the current government to avoid misinterpretation.

Braimah described the pushback from the Ministry of Roads and sections of government communication as “unsurprising,” saying officials were scrambling to defend contradictions between their past rhetoric and current practice.

“When you rush to defend what cannot be defended, your defence exposes you even more,” he argued, referencing discrepancies in the Ministry’s later publication of what it called old and new Big Push contracts.

According to him, some contracts labelled as “inherited” were recorded with award dates in 2025 — long after the current government took office — raising further questions about accuracy.