The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has continued to laud and tout the recently launched National Digital Property Addressing System, commonly known as the Ghana Post GPS.
Speaking at the 18th Congregation of the University of Development Studies, the Vice President once again refuted rife claims that the newly introduced system is fraught with shortcomings, pointing out that the system which has been put in place in Ghana is more advanced than the ones existing in the United Kingdom and United States.
See: How To Download and Use The GhanaPostGPS App
“For me and I say this very seriously, this national address system that Ghana has implemented is more advanced than the address systems that they have in London or the United States,” Bawumia said.
Continuing, he reprimanded Ghanaians for always having a mindset that technologies of developed countries will always be better than the ones we have down here, urging his audience to drop such mindset and believe that we can actually do things better than the Europeans.
Bawumia’s comments forms part of his responses to massive criticisms the Ghana Post GPS have received since after its launch last month. Prominent among the critics are members of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), such as Former President John Mahama, Former Deputy Chief-of-Staff, Valerie Sawyerr as well as some ICT experts.
According to the critics, the Ghana Post GPS is a hype, with its features and functions blown out of proportion by Bawumia and the NPP government. The cost of the project has also been highly criticised, on the grounds that it was bloated. Mahama specifically described the system as ‘419’ (a scam) considering its cost since the same system could be accessed on Google Maps for free.
In response to this, Bawumia described Mahama as ‘clueless’, asking him to desist from cheap propaganda and reminding him of the numerous shady dealings that went unaccounted for under his administration.
The Ghana Post GPS (Digital Property Address System) is an Information Technology location-based navigation system designed by Ghanaian information technology firm, Vokacom to tackle the challenge of property addressing in the country.
It forms part of the initiatives of the Akufo-Addo government that are geared towards the recording of all state properties and citizen’s data in a centralized national database with the aim of facilitating national planning and a formalised economic development.
The system has been designed to comprehensively map the entirety of Ghana, dividing the country into grids of 5m x 5m squares and assigning each one a unique and permanent address, known as a digital address. Among the very many expected benefits of the addressing system are improved location/property navigation, faster emergency response, advanced crime control, improved revenue collection, among others.
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