Ghana Wanted a Cathedral. It Got an ‘Expensive Hole’ Instead.

The walls surrounding the Ghana National Cathedral are plywood that ages. Its needles are yellow construction cranes, which have not moved in years. It often reverberates with the song, the song of a chorus of frogs that moves every time the foundations of the medium cathedral are filled.

The former president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, spent about $ 58 million public money on the $ 400 million cathedral project, a large sum in this country in Western Africa with a debt. The new finance minister said in March that Ghana’s economy was in “severe anguish.”

The cathedral was designed by celebrities architect David Adjaye. But beyond the plans, there is very little to show for money.

“They have only dug a hole, a great hole,” said student Chinedu, a Pentecostal student, last month.

A well -manifested Bible hidden under the arm, was emerging from a morning service in Pure Fire Mirecles Ministries in a street humming with parishioners, vegetables of ice cream and clamor children. His brother John, who had been buying anointing oil, was accompanied. “God is not going to be happy,” he said.

In Accra, Ghana’s coastal capital, citizens joke saying that the hole is the largest and largest in the world. A valuable stretch of land surrounded by museums, bank headquarters and some of Ghana’s most ritz hotels were authorized from government buildings for the church. That land is now full of vegetation and bird life, an incesis exception of scrap thieves and, occasionally in the rainy season, swimmers organize acrobatics for social networks.

The unpredered cathedral became a symbol of economic mismanagement and a political battlefield after Mr. Akufo-Addo said that its construction had to fulfill a personal promise that had made God.

Now that Mr. Akufo-Addo has left office, the project appears permanently convicted.

The cathedral is now an important objective of the anti -corruption initiative of the new government, called Operation Recover All Loot. Last month, the Government announced that it would no longer finance the project and dissolve the agency responsible for managing it.

Africa is home to the world’s largest Christian population. Ghana, where faith is a special for young people, has recently seen a tree in the construction of the Church.

But the National Cathedral project never attracted the support that Mr. Akufo-Addo anticipated. On the other hand, the construction stagnated in its foundations when Ghana suffered his economic crisis in a generation.

For many Ghanaans legally, a cathedral has seemed the last thing that the country needs, especially one with an estimated cost of $ 400 million.

The project begged with a lot of fanfare. In 2019, at a fund increase dinner in Washington, a smiling of Mr. Akufo-Addo cut a great gray and square discount, the planned cathedral in cake. With an auditorium of 5,000 seats and a concave roof that refers to the curve of real stool, intended to be much more than a cathedral. It should be a national monument, similar to the National Cathedral of Washington or the Westminster Cathedral of London. A place where the solemn state ceremonies would take place, such as the funerals of the presidents and the royal weddings.

Mr. Akufo-Addo, who was born in a Presbyterian family, but became Anglican when he was young, told the group gathered in Washington that the interdenominational cathedral was a unifier for the Ghanaian Christians, which represented more than 70 percent of the population. It would also be an offer of thanks to God for saving the country from epidemics, civil wars and famines that had affected their neighbors, he said.

But then revealed a third reason for its construction.

“I promised God that if beer to the president, after two failed attempts, in the 2016 presidential elections, I will build a cathedral for the glory of God,” he told the official readings of the event.

The statement turned out to be a gift for the opponents of Mr. Akufo-Addo, who argued that the president should not be allowed to use public money as part of a personal bargain he did with God only $ 58 million.

Paul Opoku-Mensah, executive director of the agency that supervises the project, said the demonization of the cathedral quickly became “a political strategy.”

In March 2024, a member of Parliament, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, directed a march to the construction site, cutting a red ribbon at his door to make fun of the president to order what was still a giant hole.

“We are demanding that contracts are immediately terminated to avoid greater financial loss for the State,” he said.

If using the cathedral to attack the president was a political strategy, it worked. John Mahama, a former president who promised to create jobs and fix the economy, achieved a dramatic return in the December elections. He made Mr. Okudzeto Ablakwa his Foreign Minister.

The accusations of corruption of taking the center of the stage in the Ghanaian elections, and the great sums involved in the National Project of the Cathedral convinced many Ghanans that the officials had been discarding at the top. A public people defender said the acquisition rules had been raped and exceeded a forensic audit.

But in a Big Hole interview at the beginning of April, Mr. Opoku-Mensah said he had nothing to hide and had delivered all the accounts to the researchers.

He explained that the cathedral was not really destined as a church, but as an important monument that had needed state money to begin, but would become a magnet of obtaining profits for visitors.

“It is a fundamental misunderstanding of vision,” he said.

Mr. Akufo-Addo also seemed confused by the controversy. “I find it difficult to see what is so problematic about it,” he said in an interview in April at his house at home lodged from a lush garden. I mouse out loud about whether people believed that “it would be a tribute too big to my leadership.”

Now that the country’s leaders have changed, few Ghanans support to support the cathedral. Those who say that Mr. Akufo-Addo and others should pay the bill, but not taxpayers.

“It should be founded through donations,” said Esi Darko, an architect, when he left the church an afternoon recently in an Accra neighborhood known as Christian Village. “It should not be imposed on everyone because not all are Christians.”

There are also about five million Muslims in Ghana, a country of more than 35 million people and, lately, a growing number of atheists.

“Don’t you believe in God?” Read a billboard in the center of ACCRA. “You are not alone.”

The equally prominent Christians have been grated in the project. Upon arriving at the Church, he leads a recent Sunday, a well -known shepherd, Lawrence Tetteh, and his sister Lady Gifty Tetteh, a British Ghana lawyer, got into Mr. Tetteh’s office for an interview.

He hugged the cathedral project initially, he said. He thought that the Christians of different denominations would be gathered by him, like the Ghanaian Muslims are by the National Mosque, built by Turkey in 2021. But when he saw so much state money spent, Mr. Tetteh said, he stopped supporting the idea.

“We are a developing nation,” he said. “As much as it is good to have a building, we don’t want a situation in which our building eats small that the nation has to live.”

Mrs. Tetteh said that God would understand if the president explained that she could not comply with her promise of the cathedral. “God is not a difficult task,” he said. Perhaps, he suggested, the former president could build a small prayer room.

Francis Kokutse contributed reports.