Is it too much to use taxpayers’ money for nat’l cathedral? Should poverty, politics stop us? – Ofori-Atta asks critics

Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta has wondered if using state funds to build the national cathedral that President Nana Akufo-Addo promised to put up for God, if he won the presidency, was too much.

“At any point in time when these buildings were built in Europe, was it ever the right time? How do we fund it will become the question”, he asked in an interview on state-owned GTV on Sunday, 12 June 2022.

“Is the executive mindful of the current situation? We shouldn’t snuff out our religiousness or spirituality because we are poor”, he noted.

“The Lord will understand if we put our widow’s mite in there”, Mr Ofori-Atta noted.

“That question being asked is that: Are we spending money from state coffers? Is that too much to do because we are politicising it? Do we really want to stop it? That is going to be my question.”

He said: “As a minister of finance, we are looking at resources and how much we put in there at every point in time that is sensible and, so, as we speak, we have spent less than one-thousandth of our expenditure on that.”

“I am very confident of raising revenue to be able to fund this and then, more importantly, if I want to look into the economics of it, I truly see an overwhelming capacity that this will pay off.

“Typically, I am looking at an internal rate of return, so, we should put this in mind”, the president’s cousin noted.

A few days ago, the Member of Parliament for North Tongu, Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, alleged that on the 29th of October 2020, a few weeks before the national elections, Mr Ofori-Atta, acting on a request by President Akufo-Addo’s Chief of Staff, authorised the release of GHS142,762,500.00 for national cathedral planned activities.

According to Mr Ablakwa, contrary to legal requirements, the government concealed “this ginormous GHS142.7 million from Parliament as they deliberately failed to disclose this item as part of their expenditure returns of 2020 during the 2021 budget consideration in Parliament.”

This 2020 cathedral expenditure, the opposition MP noted, was also kept away from the Auditor-General in his 2020 audit.

In a Facebook post, the lawmaker said so far, adding this latest exposé to his previous leaks, the Akufo-Addo government has spent GHS199,832,603.00 of taxpayer funds on a cathedral which was originally presented to Ghanaians as a personal pledge to God that will not be executed with taxpayer funds.

Digging into the tonnes of documents, Mr Ablakwa stated that many more millions have been paid illegally which “we shall continue to put out to the glory of God and in the overall national interest. On a further scarier note, the figures we are currently reviewing do not look like anything near a seed capital.”

He said this GHS200 million cathedral gate has turned out to be the biggest presidential scandal in Ghana’s entire history.

He described as terribly shocking, how President Akufo-Addo and his men could engage in “such ungodly, illegal and insensitive conduct.”

In the name of a cathedral project, Mr Ablakwa again alleged that a corrupt slush fund has been created to siphon taxpayer funds from the suffering masses on the blind side of Parliament, the Auditor-General, CSOs and other accountability systems.

“Instructively, these illegal diversions took place when the government was engaged in massive vote-buying to win the 2020 elections; it was also the period COVID-19 had peaked and placed enormous pressure on our health delivery as many Ghanaians died, and yet President Akufo-Addo claimed he couldn’t find the resources to fulfill his Agenda 111 pledge of building new hospitals,” he stated.