A Data Scientist and Policy Analyst, Alfred Appiah, has punched holes into the Presidency’s investigation following reports by the Fourth Estate on the Mahama government’s Big Push road projects.
It will be recalled that The Fourth Estate publication unearthed that the Road Ministry awarded 81 sole-sourced contracts worth over GHS73 billion in 7 months.
Following that expose, President John Dramani Mahama instructed his office to obtain the full detailed report from the Fourth Estate concerning the Road Ministry’s GH¢73b Big Push sole-sourcing contracts.
According to President John Dramani Mahama, his office is to conduct a study of the various allegations presented in the report.
President Mahama also directed the Ministry of Roads and Highways to answer all the allegations made in the report.
Following the Presidency’s investigation report being made public, a Data Scientist and Policy Analyst, Alfred Appiah, has detailed that the report by the government leaves a lot to be desired.
He raised the first red flag of the Presidency’s report for self-investigating the Roads Ministry’s Big Push infrastructure projects without independent oversight, arguing that it clears the ministry of any wrongdoing despite data showing 47% single-sourced contracts overall.
He disclosed that the report finds that out of 140 Big Push contracts, 66 were single-sourced, adding that President Mahama promised that single sourcing would be the rare exception.
The Data Analyst argued that ‘getting half your contracts through single sourcing doesn’t really look like “rare exception” territory, no matter how you frame it’.
Alfred Appiah detailed that, excluding the 23 inherited legacy projects under the Akufo-Addo government, the single-source contracts rise to 56%.
In a post shared on X, the Data Scientist and Policy Analyst wrote, “I have reviewed the Presidency’s investigation report into the claims made by the Fourth Estate on the Big Push projects, and I must say the investigation leaves a lot to be desired. The first flag is that this is the Presidency investigating its own ministry without the involvement of any clearly independent body.
The report, in effect, clears the Roads Ministry of any wrongdoing. But the data and methodology don’t support the conclusions.
The report finds that out of 140 Big Push contracts, 66 were single-sourced. That’s basically half. President Mahama has repeatedly promised that single sourcing would be the rare exception, not the norm. Getting half your contracts through single sourcing doesn’t really look like “rare exception” territory, no matter how you frame it.
It’s also worth noting that 23 of those 140 contracts are legacy projects inherited from the previous administration, not contracts MRH itself procured or chose a method for. Including them in the denominator quietly lowers the single-sourcing percentage. Strip them out and look only at the 117 contracts MRH actually awarded under this government, and the single-sourced share rises well to 56%, more than half”.
He further detailed, “So how does the report get to “no abuse”? It compares that 47% figure to ALL contracts MRH awarded, including hundreds of routine road maintenance contracts that have nothing to do with Big Push. Against that much bigger pool, single sourcing only looks like 4.58% of everything. That’s technically true, but it’s the wrong comparison. If you want to know whether single sourcing became the norm inside the Big Push programme specifically, you have to look at Big Push contracts specifically, where the answer is more than 50%, once you exclude the inherited projects.
There’s a second issue that’s arguably bigger. One of the bigger claims by the Fourth Estate was that around 90% of the total cash value of Big Push contracts went to single sourcing. The report spends a lot of pages knocking down individual allegations about contract counts, but it never actually goes back and recalculates the money-weighted share using its own corrected list of 140 contracts. That’s a strange gap, because counting contracts one-to-one treats a 50 million cedis feeder road job the same as a 3 billion cedis highway dualisation. Contracts aren’t uniform in size, so a count-based percentage can look moderate while the actual money tells a completely different story. If the single-sourced contracts tend to be the bigger, more expensive ones, then the “it’s only 47% of contracts” framing understates the real picture by a lot”.
He further argued that there was a data inconsistency that never gets addressed in the presidential reports.
The Policy Analyst noted that despite concluding there was no abuse, the report still recommends mandatory Value for Money certificates before single-source contracts can be awarded.
Alfred Appiah added, “There’s also a data inconsistency that never gets addressed. Earlier in the report, MRH itself tells the investigator that 61 out of 139 Big Push contracts were single-sourced. Later in the same report, the investigator’s own “verified” findings say it’s actually 66 out of 140. Nobody explains where the extra 5 single-sourced contracts came from or why the ministry’s own submitted numbers don’t match the report’s final numbers. There have been many inconsistencies in this same project!
The justifications for using single sourcing (timelines, security concerns, inflationary costs) can be applied to any problem Ghana faces. For instance, the government promised a 24h economy and youth unemployment is deemed a national security threat, so why are Ghanaians still waiting for the 24h economy to be implemented?
Despite concluding there was no abuse, the report still recommends mandatory Value for Money certificates before single-source contracts can be awarded, Cabinet approval for high-value single-source deals, and faster legislation to restrict single sourcing going forward. Those are fairly serious fixes to propose for a system the report just said wasn’t being abused. It reads more like the report sees a real governance gap, even if the headline conclusion doesn’t say so directly”, his post concluded.
See the post below:
I have reviewed the Presidency's investigation report into the claims made by the Fourth Estate on the Big Push projects and I must say the investigation leaves a lot to be desired. The first flag is that this is the Presidency investigating its own ministry without the… pic.twitter.com/T9xW6RNsv3
— Alfred (@CallmeAlfredo) June 21, 2026
