The Roads Minister, Governs Kwame Agbodza, has strongly defended changes to the Suame Interchange project, insisting that the redesign is driven by engineering rather than cost-cutting.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday, he rejected claims that scaling down the project amounts to reducing investment.

“No one is taking one cedi out of the project,” he said. “Whatever savings are made out of not building the fourth tier will be applied to let’s start building the road from the interchange towards Mampong, which is a road in a very terrible situation currently.”

The Minister explained that the project stalled earlier due to funding challenges.

“It stopped because we were owing the contractor in excess of $23 million for work done and not paid for,” he said.

He noted that the original plan for a four-tier interchange was not fully aligned with traffic realities.

“If you notice what we were doing, we could actually do the grade separation. But beyond that, they get stuck, because on the Mampong road, there’s no work going on there, so the traffic was still going to build up,” he said.

He argued that a better solution is to divert traffic away from Kumasi altogether.

“The right thing to do, actually, was to do a diversion at around Ejisu, so to bypass Kumasi completely, if your destination is not Kumasi,” he explained.

He added that such a move could significantly reduce traffic pressure.

“We could completely divert 50% or so of the traffic coming from Accra from entering Kumasi at all, if they were not intended to come to Kumasi by going on to the bypass,” he said.

Based on this, he insisted the fourth tier is unnecessary.

“As a result, you don’t need all four interchanges to do it,” he said. “We probably don’t need the four-tier. We probably can reduce it to three tiers.”

He also revealed that land compensation issues added to the decision.

“There was a part of the area which we needed to build the fourth tier… I’m told that the lawyers wrote and said that they want over GH¢100 million as compensation, which was not part of the project,” he disclosed.

Responding to criticism from his predecessor, Francis Asenso-Boakye, and the Ashanti caucus, the Minister dismissed suggestions that the redesign is flawed.

“It has nothing to do with engineering. It’s pure politics,” he said.

He also questioned the previous leadership’s handling of the project.

“In any case, Asenso was minister when the project was abandoned; we never saw him mobilise,” he said.

The Minister maintained that the revised plan will still address congestion effectively.

“I can guarantee you what we want to do will be an engineering solution,” he said.

He stressed that attention must also be paid to the surrounding roads to ensure the interchange operates efficiently.

“In any case, we need to do other roads linking the interchange,” he added.

The changes to the Suame Interchange have sparked debate, but the Minister insists the approach will deliver better results without cutting investment.