The National Communications Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress, Sammy Gyamfi, says the government will not be able to access 20% of the $2bn earmarked for the Synohydro deal by 2024.

This according to him is because Ghana needs an integrated aluminum industry to process bauxite which will then serve as payment for the $2bn the country gets from China.

However, the government is not only yet to start mining bauxite at the Atewa forest but the country does not have a refinery built to process the bauxite, he said on Newsfile, Saturday.

“This is what happens when you have a group of people in government who specialize in building castles in the air. So I can tell you that they are not even going to get 20% of that $2bn by 2024, because the Chinese are not “fools”. They know that you are supposed to pay them with proceeds from your processed bauxite.”

“GIADEC (Ghana Integrated Aluminum Development Corporation) has done basically nothing, you don’t have a bauxite refinery, it will take you a minimum of three years to put that up and it will take billions of dollars to do that,” Sammy Gyamfi said.

He explained that as of October 2021, the government has only been able to draw down $100 million dollars which represent 5% of the total money for the deal.

His comment comes after a documentary by JoyNews questioned where the $2 billion Sinohydro money meant to fix Ghana’s infrastructure needs was.

As part of a memorandum signed between Ghana and China in 2018, Beijing will finance $2 billion worth of rail, road and bridge networks, and in exchange, China will be granted access to 5% of Ghana’s bauxite reserves.

On November 21, 2018, Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah announced that the first tranche of $649 million from the $2 billion facility has been made available for Ghana to access. However, three years on, only about $100 million of this amount has been released to Ghana.

Meanwhile, many of the projects including the Adenta-Dodowa road which was one of ten lots approved for phase one under the Chinese sponsored Sinohydro deal remains undone.

Sammy Gyamfi believes that despite the government’s claims that it has started some of the projects those projects are nowhere near their completion.

He explained that the projects under phase one categorised in ten lots were expected to be completed by the end of 2020 however, about four of them are yet to begin.

“Now we are told by the government that they have been able to draw down $100m. So let’s even accept that that constitutes 5% of the $2bn dollars and constitutes only 15% of the $649m which was supposed to be for phase one. So yes you may be doing something but that is nothing compared to what we expect based on what you promised.”