GhanaPost app: Government paid $2.5m for ‘free’ Google service – IT Researcher

Ghana Post app

A Ghanaian researcher based in the United States of America, Kingsley Komla Elikem, has said government did not need to award a $2.5million contract to VOKACOM to develop the Ghana Post GPS app to be used for Ghana’s digital addressing system because that technology already existed on Google.

The app is meant to provide an effective means of assigning addresses to every location and place in the country.

Mr Elikem, critiquing the Ghana Post GPS app, said the technology already exists and, therefore, government and VOKACOM had not done anything new.

Speaking on Monday, 23 October, 2017 on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM, he said: “When the Vice President said we should be expecting something like a digital addressing system that was unprecedented and never seen before, never heard about before, and the USA and UK will have been far behind and we will have been far ahead, it got many of us excited but when it came out, it was necessary to take a look at it and find out how far the Vice President’s words went.

“The President, during the launch, said the Vice President and his team worked so hard, so I could imagine a lot of man hours was put into this amount of work, but by the time I started to look at it, I realised they had done nothing. They did not step out of the office; it was just one person sitting in the office. The guy who did the coding is in Seattle and so he just sat down and did some coding. Nobody is disputing the fact that the server is in United States and so that was all that it was about. Nothing was done, no work was done. Currently, everything they have done is already existing… one of the things they did is you’ll generate a number based on longitudes and latitudes but it is already existing…”

He added: “We didn’t need Ghana Post GPS. Ghana could have generated the numbers for free on Google. They could have added more to the existing apps available, and there was no reason to have given VOKACOM the same job to do.”

Meanwhile, some Information Technology (IT) experts who have reviewed the application available on various mobile operating systems have also given poor ratings of the app.

 

Source: classfmonline