Less than one percent of the over GH¢80million debt owed by the Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL) and the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) to the Ghana Meteorological Agency (G-Met)has been paid.
This, according to the G-Met, was after persistent pleadings by its authorities for the two institutions to pay them for services rendered several years ago.
The Chief Forecaster at the G-Met, Felicity Ahafianyo, who made the revelations on 3FM’s Sunrise hosted by Alfred Ocansey on Tuesday, explained that “they have released some funds”.
“I don’t know the exact amount but it’s less than 1% of the total amount. The cheque was picked last month and it’s been cleared now. It was paid around last week in June,” she explained.
Madam Ahafianyo explained that “we have farmers that we give updates to on a daily basis. Fishermen are also benefiting but in all these, they owe us and they are refusing to pay”.
“And when they want to pay, our bosses must go and beg and beg and beg and beg as if we are begging for money but we are not requesting money from them. The amount is a service we have rendered to them and they are to pay us.”
The Chief Forecaster said they need this money to be able to procure more equipment to be able to provide quality services to their clients because the agency has just one radar, which also broke down years ago.
“Our equipment is very expensive. The radar is not working. It’s broken down but we have a lot of other instruments that we use. We are based on the internet and the satellite so we use them to predict but the radar increases the accuracy…the radar helps us when there is going to be a storm. You are able to tell the liquid content in the storm and see whether it is going to cause floods so that we are able to inform NADMO on what to do.”
Madam Ahafianyo said people did not have trust in them because they are unable to predict accurately due to the challenges but if the over GH¢80 million is paid, they will be able to purchase more radars to be able to predict accurately.
“We need four [radars] to be able to cover the whole country. People initially don’t have faith in our forecast. We are still not perfect but we are still trying to perfect our operations so we need the over GH¢80 million debt, which is internally generated funds to be able to serve.”
Source: 3news.com|Ghana