Mr Yaw Osafo Marfo, Senior Minister-designate, has said there was no scandal in connection with the purchase of textbooks from Macmillan Education Limited when he was Minister of Education under the John Agyekum Kufuor presidency in 2005.
Reports in the Daily Dispatch newspaper in 2005 suggested that the then Education Minister was embroiled in a dubious scandal involving the printing of some textbooks for Ghanaian schools to the sum of over $27million without parliamentary approval.
The report, also published by Ghanaweb, said: “On July 29, 2005, Mr Osafo Marfo, signed a Letter of Agreement on behalf of the Ghanaian government while Mr Edward Addo signed on behalf of Macmillan Education Limited. According to the agreement, the total cost of the supply, including insurance and freight to the Tema Port and delivery to the District Education Office, shall be US$27, 999,990, which will be payable in cedis.
“On August 26, 2005, the MoES then wrote to the Public Procurement Board (PPB) seeking approval to sole source the supply of the textbooks from Macmillan Education Limited. The MoES attached comparative price analysis of Macmillan and three other publishers – Heinemann, Oxford, and Longman, observing that Macmillan was, in all cases, very competitive.
“The MoES did not, in that letter to the PPB, reveal that the Ministry had, almost four weeks earlier, concluded and signed an agreement to effect the supply (emphasis ours). The Ministry did not tell the whole truth because some of those who were said to have submitted quotes had not been invited to do so. Based on the letter from the MoES, the PPB gave approval.”
But setting the record straight before the Appointments Committee of parliament during his vetting as Senior Minister-designate on Friday January 20, Mr Marfo said he cancelled the contract and never bought a single book from Macmillan as the reports suggested.
He told the committee: “Mr Chairman, there are two sources of book supply to Ghana, that is Macmillan and Longman. Depending on which range of the school textbook you are dealing with, one is stronger than the other. Macmillan supplies more of the basic and primary books than Longman and vice versa. But when we were tendered for this, we sought the opinion of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) on the books and found out that 68 per cent of the range of books we were talking about were supplied by Macmillan and, therefore, if you are making a choice between Longman and Macmillan, your choice is Macmillan.
“So we recommended and wrote a copious memo to the tender board for sole sourcing and then to the Procurement Centre. Now this article which came was very mischievous and I answered it at that time. It was mischievous because the very day that we got the approval from the procurement board that we could sole source because of the rationalisation that we had put out for Macmillan, we had in the morning this article appearing the in Daily Dispatch. And Mr Chairman, it is important to note that I never then pursued that whole tender. We never bought a single book from Macmillan…because I found out that there were intrigues to create problem in the whole industry and I preferred to keep my honour. So I refused to carry out the tender ad we didn’t buy anything from Macmillan.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
