A plea to the President on a university the state did not build, and a road the state promised and abandoned
Executive summary
Ashesi University sits at Berekuso, in the Akuapem South District of the Eastern Region, on the foothills of the Aburi ridge. It was founded in 2002 and moved to its Berekuso campus in 2011. It is a private, not-for-profit institution built almost entirely with private money and philanthropic support. It has become, in a very short time, one of the most respected university campuses in West Africa, and it draws students from Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, South Africa and many other African countries. Those students bring in foreign exchange, and they take home an impression of Ghana that no tourism campaign can buy.
That campus cannot be reached by a decent road. There are two approaches. One climbs from the Kitase junction on the Accra-Aburi road, a stretch of roughly seven kilometres. The other runs up from Dome-Kwabenya, roughly ten kilometres. On both, a driver is reduced to a crawl. Journeys that should take ten minutes take thirty to forty-five. In the dry season the corridor is buried in red dust. In the rains, sections turn to mud.
This is not a road that the state has overlooked. It is a road the state contracted, funded, launched with a sod-cutting, and then left unfinished. In July 2022 the Ministry of Roads and Highways signed a contract with First Sky Limited for the rehabilitation of the 23-kilometre Dome-Kitase road, designated Regional Route 98. The contract sum was about GH¢195 million, financed by the Government of Ghana and the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. The scope expressly included a one-kilometre dedicated two-lane carriageway serving Ashesi University. The works were to be completed within twenty-four months, by mid-July 2024.
More than two years past that deadline, the road remains broken. In August 2026 residents of Dome-Kwabenya, Comet, Berekuso, Agyementi and Kitase took to the streets and petitioned the President through their Members of Parliament. Their complaint was not only that the work had stalled. It was that the road had been listed as completed in the Road Sector Medium-Term Development Plan for 2026 to 2029.
This article is a respectful appeal to His Excellency President John Dramani Mahama to take personal interest in Regional Route 98, to establish and publish its true status, and to bring the outstanding works to completion under the Big Push programme. The request is modest in national terms. The consequence of continued neglect is not.
- A university the taxpayer did not pay for
Ghana did not build Ashesi. Patrick Awuah returned home, raised money, took the risk and built it. He put the campus on a hillside at Berekuso, in a farming town that had never seen an institution of that kind. The state did not fund the lecture halls, the library, the engineering workshops or the student residences. The state did not fund the endowment that supports students who cannot pay full fees.
What the university asked of the state was ordinary. It asked for the public road leading to the campus. Even that it did not get. The only properly surfaced stretch at Berekuso is the short approach the university paid for out of its own funds. A private institution has been made to build public infrastructure because the public authority responsible for it did not deliver.
There is a principle at stake beyond one campus. When a Ghanaian invests private capital in a sector the state struggles to fund, the least the state owes is the enabling infrastructure. If that bargain does not hold at Berekuso, where the results are visible and internationally acclaimed, no serious investor in education will believe it holds anywhere.
- The two roads
From the Accra side, a driver leaves Legon through Adenta, climbs past Peduase Lodge and turns off at Kitase. From that turn-off to the campus is about seven kilometres. On a good road that is a seven-minute drive. On this road it takes between thirty and forty-five minutes, at speeds that rarely exceed ten kilometres an hour.
From the Dome-Kwabenya side, the distance to the campus is about ten kilometres. That side is in worse condition. Commercial drivers who ply the stretch report that a large part of their weekly takings goes into suspension repairs, tyres and shock absorbers. Traders along the corridor complain that dust coats their goods. Schools and a health facility sit on the same stretch.
The corridor is also a strategic link. Regional Route 98 provides the shortest connection between the Accra-Kumasi road and the Accra-Aburi-Koforidua road, without passing through the congestion of either. Finished, it relieves traffic on two national routes and opens the Akuapem enclave. Unfinished, it does neither. Motorists who were once advised to use it simply refuse.
- A contract signed in 2022 and a deadline that passed in 2024
The facts of the project are on the public record. The contract was signed on 6 July 2022 between the Ministry of Roads and Highways and First Sky Limited. Construction commenced in July 2022 with a presidential sod-cutting. The Ghana Highways Authority was the implementing agency. The contract duration was twenty-four months, ending in July 2024.
The design scope was detailed and sensible. It provided for about 16.3 kilometres of two-lane single carriageway in asphaltic concrete. It provided for a 2.8-kilometre dual carriageway arterial with auxiliary lanes for pick-up and drop-off. It provided for a one-kilometre two-lane carriageway serving Ashesi University, also in asphaltic concrete. Someone sat down and thought carefully about what this corridor needed, including the needs of the university.
By early 2023 the contractor was reporting about thirty-five per cent completion and denying that work had stalled. By 2026 there was no meaningful activity on the Kwabenya to Kitase stretch. Whatever the reasons, and the usual ones are certification delays, payment arrears, utility relocation and compensation disputes, the outcome for the road user is the same. The road was dug up, left to formation level in places, and abandoned to the weather. Partially constructed roads deteriorate faster than untouched ones. In several sections the works have made the surface worse than it was before 2022.
- A road recorded as completed
The most troubling development is administrative rather than engineering. When the Dome-Kwabenya-Kitase Road Stakeholders Committee marched in August 2026, they drew attention to the listing of the road as completed in the Road Sector Medium-Term Development Plan for 2026 to 2029. Their question was simple and deserves an answer. Completed where, and on whose certification?
An entry of that kind has consequences. A road recorded as completed does not attract a fresh allocation. It does not appear on a priority list. It disappears from the annual programme of works. The communities then find themselves petitioning a ministry whose own records say their problem has been solved. Until that entry is corrected, every appeal on behalf of this corridor is being made against a document that contradicts it.
The state also needs to account for the money. The contract sum was about GH¢195 million with Kuwait Fund participation. The public is entitled to know how much has been certified, how much has been paid, what remains in the facility, and what the outstanding works will now cost at current prices. That accounting should be published, not explained away in a press briefing.
- The daily cost being carried by others
The cost of an unfinished road does not disappear. It is transferred to the people who use it.
– Health. Fine red dust from the corridor settles on homes, shops, food stalls, classrooms and lungs. Respiratory irritation along dusty untarred roads is well documented and falls hardest on children and the elderly.
– Vehicles. Drivers on the stretch spend a significant share of weekly income on repairs that a paved surface would eliminate.
– Emergency access. Ambulances and fire tenders cannot move at ten kilometres an hour and still be useful. A campus of young people on a hillside, reachable only by two broken roads, is a standing emergency-response risk.
– Time. Staff, students, traders and farmers each lose the better part of an hour a day to a distance that should take minutes.
– Land value and enterprise. Investment along the corridor is suppressed. Farm produce from the Akuapem slopes reaches Accra markets late and bruised.
These costs have been paid every day for more than twenty years. Compounded, they exceed the cost of the road several times over.
- What is actually at risk
It is tempting to treat this as a local inconvenience. It is not. Ashesi is now part of Ghana’s standing in the world, and its exposure is real.
International students choose between campuses. Parents in Lagos, Nairobi and Kigali who are deciding where to send a child will weigh a broken access road against alternatives in Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa and increasingly Morocco and Egypt. Faculty recruitment faces the same test, because a lecturer with an international career decides where to live as much as where to teach. Donors and foundations that support the university ask, reasonably, why their money should substitute for a state obligation. Conference traffic, corporate partnerships and visiting delegations all take the same road and form the same impression.
There is also a quieter risk. An institution can be strangled without any single decision to strangle it. Enrolment softens. The best staff drift away. Capital projects are deferred. Nobody signs anything, and yet the project dies. Ghana would then have managed the rare feat of losing an internationally respected university that cost the taxpayer nothing to build.
Education is one of the few services Ghana exports at a profit. Every foreign student at Berekuso pays fees in hard currency, rents accommodation, eats, travels and spends. That is export earning, generated inland, without a mine and without a rig. A government that has placed the 24-Hour Economy at the centre of its policy should recognise the value of the asset it is allowing to decay.
- The appeal
Mr. President, this is a personal appeal, made with respect and without partisan intent. The following actions are within your authority and would settle the matter.
– Direct the Ministry of Roads and Highways and the Ghana Highways Authority to publish, within thirty days, the true status of Regional Route 98: work certified, sums paid, sums outstanding, the position of the Kuwait Fund facility, and the cost to completion at current prices.
– Correct the entry in the Road Sector Medium-Term Development Plan 2026-2029 that records this road as completed, and account for how that entry was made.
– Place the outstanding works under the Big Push programme, with a commencement authorisation from the Ministry of Finance and a ring-fenced payment schedule, so that the contractor is not again stopped by arrears.
– Sequence the Berekuso to Kitase section and the one-kilometre Ashesi University carriageway into the first phase of works, since that is where the corridor is worst and where the national interest is most exposed.
– Order immediate palliative treatment ahead of full works: grading, spot gravelling, drainage clearance and dust suppression on the inhabited sections, so that the communities are not asked to endure another dry season and another rainy season in their present condition.
– Appoint a named project sponsor who reports monthly to you in writing until the road is opened, and publish a dated completion timetable that the public can hold the state to.
Ghana has found money for larger and less urgent things. Set against the value of what is at Berekuso, the balance of works on a 23-kilometre road is not a difficult decision.
- Conclusion
Patrick Awuah and the institution he built have given this country something that money alone does not produce. They have given it credibility. Young people from across the continent come here to be educated and leave thinking better of Ghana. The state did not pay for that. It has only to make the road.
The contract exists. The design exists. The funding partner exists. The engineering has been done. The only thing missing is the decision to finish what was started and the discipline to pay for it on time. Mr. President, that decision rests with you, and it should not wait for another demonstration.
Written by Nana Annor Amihere II
* The writer, Nana ANNOR AMIHERE II, is the Mandimase (Overlord), Aiyinasi-Basake Stool Lands, Eastern Nzema Traditional Area
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