Your blocking of ¢80m budget for the National Cathedral won’t stop anything – Joyce Aryee to Minority

 A member of the Board of Trustees of the National Cathedral of Ghana, Dr Joyce Aryee has said that the recent blocking of a GHS80 million budget meant for the National Cathedral by the Minority will be irrelevant.

She said that the construction of the Cathedral will go on regardless of the obstruction by the Minority in Parliament.

Speaking on the rejection of the budget, Dr Aryee said it will not bring the project to a halt because the GH¢80 million is “not the entire money that is needed to construct and complete the edifice.”

She told Accra-based Joy FM: “It does not mean the project cannot go on because I know you are going to bring your money and I will bring mine and everybody that we will approach and is willing will bring theirs.”

She added: “Really, those who are willing are the people making the money available for the construction. I think we should all keep calm and not be disturbed.”

“People have said that there has not been transparency, but every year in the budget there has been some seed money not taken from what I understand from the Contingency Fund, but I heard there’s something called Contingency Vote,” she said.

The trade, industry and tourism committee of parliament rejected the budget with the minority side of the committee voting against it in an 11:10 majority decision.

A member of the committee, Mr Yussif Sulemana, told journalists on Tuesday, 20 December 2022: “I can tell you on authority that at the end of the day, we had to vote and after the vote, the minority carried the day. We have voted against it and we are saying that this is not the time for us to be spending that huge sum of money on building a cathedral.”

    

The Bole-Bamboi MP said: “Apart from that, we were told at the committee[-level] that they had already spent GHS339 million and when we asked them to give us evidence of how the money was spent, it was a challenge.”

Again, he noted, “we were told that they have moved the cathedral from wherever it was to the ministry of tourism. And the question I put to them was that that organisation that is handling this cathedral, the secretariat, is it under the ministry of tourism?