Wa Assembly tackles road projects
The Wa Municipal Assembly hopes to, by the end of next year, pave and coat about 70 per cent of the streets in the Wa Municipality with tar. The road works are a component of a programme to give the Upper West Regional capital a facelift.
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At the moment, only 135.8 km out of the total 385.4 km of the road network in Wa has been paved. The remaining 249.6 km, representing 65 per cent of road network in the municipality, is still untarred.
According to the Wa Municipal Chief Executive, Mr Issahaku Nuhu Putiaha, it had become urgent to tar the roads in Wa as a means of accommodating the growth and expansion of the municipality.
"Residents and motorists complain of dust from the untarred roads, which we are trying to address and it is also true that an improved road network with good surface will open up the municipality very quickly and allow for speedy development of the town," he said at a media briefing in Wa last Friday.
He added that paved roads also reduced travel time and encouraged economic activities within an area.
Paved roads
He said in 2014, the departments of Feeder Roads and Urban Roads, under the auspices of the municipal assembly, paved 6.3 km of the road in Wa, and by the end of March this year 15.55 km of the road had been paved.
Last year's roadworks covered Kunta, Mangu, Dondoli, Tender Day Care and Dan Ibu area roads.
Contractors working on the road are currently shaping a 1.2 km stretch of road in the town and also working on a 2 km dual carriageway leading to the Wa campus of the University for Development Studies (UDS) and links the school’s lecture blocks to the campus clinic and students' hostels.
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The UDS roads are being undertaken by the municipal assembly at a cost of GH¢2.1 million. Meanwhile, an ongoing partial reconstruction of a 7.1 km single lane carriageway running through the town has been awarded at a cost GH¢2.6 million.
All the road projects are planned to bridge "the ratio between paved and unpaved roads in the region".
Major challenges
The Wa MCE said the assembly’s efforts to have roads in the municipality paved and tarred were being constrained by shortages in machinery even though funds were ready for the projects to progress.
According to the Regional Director of the Department of Urban Roads, Mr Samuel Mensah, road contractors in the region either did not have the requisite machinery or had difficulty obtaining machinery for their works.
He said long distances between Wa and Tema and Takoradi, for instance, had also discouraged a number of contractors who were well equipped and based in the southern parts of the country from taking up jobs in the Upper West Region. Furthermore, he said lack of permanent offices and accommodation for staff members was a major challenge which deterred well-resourced contractors from taking up jobs in the region.
Moreover, he said, the nearest quarry to Wa was in the Wenchi area in the Brong Ahafo Region, and this meant that road contractors had to travel more than 250 kilometres to fetch chippings for their road projects.
"All these serve to discourage contractors who even have the capacity to undertake jobs in the Upper West Region, when similar projects with relatively little stress are available elsewhere," he said.
Upper West remains the region with the least paved roads in the country, and the state of roads in Wa has come to symbolise the general condition of the region's road network.