Former Ghanaian Ambassador to Namibia and the former Editor of the Accra Daily Mail, Alhaji Haruna Atta has slammed the Akufo Addo administration for perpetrating a fraud on Ghanaians by requiring them to contribute monthly levies for the construction of the contentious National Cathedral.
He described as fraud, the recent announcement in Parliament by Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta that the government needed someone million Ghanaians to contribute GHC 100 monthly for the construction of the cathedral which is estimated to cost some US$ 200 million.
In a statement released on Tuesday, August 17, 2021, Haruna Atta expressed shock that the cathedral, a personal religious vow of President Akufo Addo should be imposed on Ghanaian taxpayers.
“Ken Ofori Atta (and how else could one put it?) gave Ghanaians one of the most brazen, unkindest and unconstitutional cuts of them all since the beginning of the 4th Republic. He looked us all directly in our faces and announced, without any shred of respect, a purely private religious initiative in our budget review, for which he said he would expect GhC100 each month from each Ghanaian,” Haruna Atta slammed the administration.
“Mr. Ofori Atta had no empathy/sympathy for the people whose “public purse” he has been charged to keep. If he had, he would have known what that same amount of money meant to us the lesser endowed. If this is not fraud, what else is? Some call it “sakawa”, others, “419” and if you want us to delve into history, “kalabule”. This same Ofori Atta found it within his brief as the chief finance officer of my country with diverse faiths, to travel to Israel to ask this Jewish non-Christian state to contribute to the construction of the so-called “national” cathedral of Ghana! Why this obsession? Is it because the Ghanaian Rasputin they have been bowing to has asked them, in cabalistic fashion, to construct such a temple of worship to assure their perpetual stay in political power? Honest, I don’t know, but it is a speculation that has been forced on Ghanaians and gaining ground….”
According to him, the so-called national cathedral had sowed such divisiveness, disunity, unconstitutional insult and discrimination in Ghana since the widely condemned proposal was mooted over four years ago by the Akufo Addo administration.
Haruna Atta wondered why right-thinking members of the Ghanaian society are allowing such a scam to get a free pass on Ghanaians.
“Where are the prelates with a conscience; academics and intellectuals with a conscience; traditional rulers with a conscience; a legislature with a conscience; a media with a conscience; civil society with a conscience, and on and on? So nothing really matters any more in Ghana, for as long as a bullying politician has been invested with an electoral outcome, he/she becomes untouchable. This is not democracy! It will not pass muster in any civilized democracy, but here we are, subject to the insults of those who would use an election outcome as the basis for proselytizing their faith.”
The Akufo Addo administration sparked massive protests, consternation and several legal suits when it announced that it wanted to construct a national cathedral to honour his God for allowing him win the 2016 presidential elections.
Against all protestations from citizens, the government went ahead to demolish public buildings on 14 acres of the most expensive land in Accra for the irksome cathedral.
The government even kicked out Appeals court judges who had their government bungalows on the lands earmarked for the cathedral. public offices like the Passport Office and the Judicial training school were all demolished to make way for the cathedral.
Initially, the government had deceptively claimed not a single public fund would go into the construction, as it would be fully funded by private partners and some churches. However, after several flip-flopping, the government finally admitted that it was committing millions of dollars worth of public funds into the project.
“ The constitution that set the stage for elections does not only allow the independence in the freedom of plural worship but also makes the secular independence of state/government paramount. A Muslim head of state would have no right of making a mosque the central focus of our nationhood nor indeed, should a Christian head of state make a Christian cathedral the
“priority of priorities” of our nationhood,” charged a peeved Haruna Atta.