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The Majority Leader, Mr Alban S.K. Bagbin, has stated that furniture and other fittings for the Job 600 office complex for Members of Parliament were procured from China because no local company could have met the demand.

He explained that local furniture companies did not have the expertise and the equipment to manufacture the kind of furniture required for the complex.

The Nadowli/Kaleo MP made this disclosure when addressing the Parliamentary Press Corps on Thursday on the prudence in importing furniture from China, in view of the assertion that it would have been more cost-effective to procure them locally.

He alleged that when such huge orders were made, the local furniture companies procured furniture from China, put huge profit margins on them and sold them locally.

Mr Bagbin said it was, therefore, more prudent for Parliament to procure the furniture directly from China, emphasising that "it is cheaper that way".

He said importing furniture from abroad also saved Ghana's forests as it minimised the cutting down of trees.

Mr Bagbin did not mention the details of how much it cost the state to import the furniture from China.

Background

The Speaker of Parliament, Mr Edward Doe Adjaho, last Tuesday said the rehabilitation and refurbishment of the office complex had been completed and that the leadership of the House, as well as staff of the Parliamentary Service, would inspect the edifice and brief the House on work done.

The complex was completed after six years of rehabilitation which cost more than $80 million.

Furniture brouhaha

The importation of furniture from China for the Chamber of Parliament in October last year drew criticisms from some members of the public who considered it a waste of resources.

They were of the opinion that the huge foreign exchange used could have been saved and the furniture procured locally.

What was worse, some of the chairs and desks got broken on the first day of use. The leadership of Parliament in a bid to convince the public that the decision made was right, granted media interviews to explain its action.

But the Minority Leader, Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, made matters worse, when during one of his interviews on an Accra radio station he asked the host of the programme: "So do you want us to sit on plastic chairs?"

Occupation

According to Mr Bagbin, Members of Parliament would move into the rehabilitated and refurbished complex next month.

He said a comprehensive programme had been drawn by the leadership of the House by which members would occupy the edifice.

He added that occupancy would be done in phases, adding that not all MPs would be allocated offices.

He explained that the offices available were 252, while Parliament was made up of 275 members and, as a result, members of the Legislature who were also members of the Executive would not be allocated offices.

Mr Bagbin said MPs who were also ministers of state already had offices as ministers and, therefore, it would not be fair to provide them offices in the complex at the expense of MPs who were not members of the Executive.

However, he said, all ministers and deputy ministers would be allocated one general office from which they would operate, if they wished.

... And local furniture producers angry

The president of the Woodworkers Association of Ghana (WAG), Mr Reynolds Afeke Debrah, has said members of the association have the capacity to produce the type of furniture required for the Job 600 Office Complex for Members of Parliament (MPs).

He told the Daily Graphic that not all woodworkers had the equipment and expertise to carry out such a project but there were at least seven companies in the country which had the capacity.

He named the companies as Modern Furniture Company Ltd, Furnat Furniture, Tech Afric, Faith Joinery, Agorwu and Kpogas.

“It is unfortunate that those representing us would say that we cannot meet the demand and that they prefer to buy furniture from elsewhere. It is sad,” he said. He described as false, the statement made by the Majority Leader, Mr Alban Bagbin, to the effect that local furniture manufacturers, when given contracts, procured the furniture from outside, put huge margins on them and sold them, thereby making huge profits and said what local woodworkers bought from outside the country was materials which they used to add value to the wood.

“All over the world people buy materials from elsewhere and use them in the manufacture of products or to add value to products. That is what we do.

“Those who produce iron sheets in Ghana procure materials from outside. Does that mean if government agencies want to buy iron sheets they should do so from outside the country because the manufacturers buy materials from outside?,” he asked.

Mr Debrah said what the MPs had succeeded in doing by their action was to give a signal to Ghanaians that foreign goods were better than local ones and that they should patronise goods manufactured elsewhere.

“They are making the dollar stronger than the cedi. As MPs, they should be encouraging Ghanaians to purchase local goods.

When you go to China, they buy made-in-China goods. The Chinese government does not procure from outside, things that can be manufactured at home. Where their people do not have the capacity, the government helps them to acquire that capacity,” he said.

He asked that even if it were true that local furniture manufacturers did not have the capacity, what, as leaders of the country, were the MPs doing about it. He said as local wood manufacturers, the association was creating jobs and added that the patronage of foreign-made furniture created jobs for people in other countries and collapsed Ghanaian businesses.

Depletion of forests

Mr Debrah debunked the claim by Mr Bagbin that procuring furniture locally led to the depletion of the country’s forests and said what led to the reduction in the country’s forest cover was the export of lumber from Ghana.

“The Chinese from whom they bought their furniture come to Ghana and take away huge quantities of lumber. Ghana exports huge quantities of lumber to other countries. That is what is depleting the country’s forests and not the work of local wood manufacturers,” he said.