The Chairman of Parliament's Committee on Assurances, Dominic Nitiwul, recently took on President John Mahama and his cabinet following the government’s termination of Zoomlion’s contract with the Youth Employment Agency (YEA).

“Whatever decision you people took, you may have to review it because the assemblies are clearly not ready. They need to build their capacity before they can take over. The way the Zoomlion contract was stopped without an alternative is part of the problems [the 2026 flooding] we have,” he said.

“I’m sure the president will get that message from this committee,” he continued. “There’s no single person who has not realised that it was a mistake [to cancel Zoomlion’s contract].”

Well, many people in Ghana hailed President John Mahama and still believe the contract was unconscionable and must be terminated. The contract, which was fraught with corruption, stated that Zoomlion should pay the sweepers GHS250 cedis a month and keep GHS 600 out of the GHS850 allocated to each sweeper per month. But that’s not the substance of this write-up.

In what appears to be a well-rehearsed and choreographed show, John Mahama’s Minister for Local Government, Ahmed Ibrahim, agreed with and praised Mr Nitiwul highly for saying the president and his cabinet made a grave mistake.

Ahmed Ibrahim called on the Minister of Health, who was presumably present at the hearing, to support him when he (Ahmed Ibrahim) tabled the motion in cabinet to bring back Zoomlion’s contract, as Nitiwul had called for.

I have known Mr Nitiwul to be a level-headed politician, so I was surprised he stooped so low for the well-orchestrated propaganda for Zoomlion. Many people tagged me in the story published from his comments, and some sent it to me. Instead of responding to his statement, I sent him a WhatsApp message to understand where he was coming from. In that message, I said:

“Which contract are you referring to? Zoomlion still has the contract to collect and lift the waste. Are you saying your assembly cannot supervise the sweepers? That’s the contract that has been terminated?”

A minute later, Mr Nitiwul called me. Like many others who are being misled by Ibrahim Ahmed and the Zoomlion propaganda machinery in the media, he did not know that Zoomlion still had the contract to lift the waste to the final disposal sites.

“Don’t take my word,” I challenged him. “Call the MCE of your assembly and ask him whether the government has cancelled the waste lifting and disposal contract.”

“I don’t doubt you,” he told me. “You have never told me anything that turned out not to be true.”

In the waste management value chain, Zoomlion has multiple sanitation contracts. When the company was formed in 2006 and had only man-powered tricycles from China, the Kufuor administration handpicked Zoomlion for the contract to manage sweepers all over Ghana. That was how the YEA contract with Zoomlion started.

 The contract said each sweeper should be allocated GHS 350 cedis. Out of this, only GHS 50 should be paid to the youth in whose name the government formed the Youth Employment Programme. The remaining GHS 300 should be retained by Zoomlion as management fees.

In the years that followed, the terms and conditions of this contract worsened. The government could not even verify Zoomlion’s claim that it controlled 45,000 sweepers, but it paid Zoomlion nonetheless.

In July 2007, the Local Government Ministry ordered all metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana to stop evacuating their own waste and sign another contract with Zoomlion, so that after the sweepers managed by Zoomlion cleaned the market, the assemblies would pay Zoomlion from their common Fund to dispose of that waste.

That contract, the Sanitation Improvement Package, has existed since 2007.

That contract requires waste trucks, which some assemblies do not have because they were compelled by the government to stop providing that service and hand it over to Zoomlion since 2007. The big assemblies, such as KMA, AMA, Tarkwa Nsuaem, have their own equipment because Zoomlion has proven incapable of conveying all the waste from public spaces through the SIP contract.

In Mr Nitiwul’s mind, just as many Ghanaians have been fed false information, the SIP contract has been terminated, and the government did not allow the assemblies to acquire their own equipment before terminating that contract.

When I gave him the facts, he was surprised that Mahama’s own appointee, Ahmed Ibrahim, created that impression at the committee.

I didn’t want to proceed with writing this piece based on Mr Nitiwul’s trust in my information, so I called the Municipal Chief Executive for Nanumba North, Abdul Somed Hamza Gurundow. Nanumba North is Dominic Nitiwul’s home assembly.

He confirmed that his assembly indeed still has a contract with Zoomlion to evacuate the waste. The assembly is managing the sweepers, and Zoomlion is responsible for evacuating the waste.

Even with the evacuation of the waste, he said, if the assembly had waste management equipment, it could do the work Zoomlion is doing “more effectively.”

The assemblies do not have the equipment because governments, over the years, have crippled them in favour of Zoomlion.

In 2007, when the SIP was being signed, Zoomlion didn’t have the equipment to cover all the assemblies. But the government started paying the company even when it hadn’t provided the equipment or executed the service. A CHRAJ investigation completed in 2018 reveals this.

In the Wassa Amenfi East District, Zoomlion rented the assembly’s waste truck to provide the service for the assembly, which was already providing its own service with its machinery. Zoomlion paid the assembly GHS 2000 a month, while the assembly paid Zoomlion GHS 7000 a month.

When the Akufo-Addo administration used hundreds of millions of dollars from the District Assemblies’ Common Fund to buy them equipment, it bought them road construction equipment, not sanitation equipment.

With a big budget, the media, and the sector minister on its side, the misinformation that favours Zoomlion will continue to thrive.

But the critical question remains: What does Ahmed Ibrahim gain by helping spread disinformation that makes the President who appointed him and his cabinet look like idiots, who plunged the nation into a sanitation crisis without an alternative?