The walls surrounding Ghana’s national cathedral are aging plywood. Its spires are yellow construction cranes, which have not moved in years. It frequently reverberates with singing — the singing of a choir of frogs that moves in whenever the cathedral’s half-finished foundations fill with rainwater.
Ghana’s former president, Nana Akufo-Addo, spent around $58 million of public money on the $400 million cathedral project — a huge sum in this debt-saddled West African country. The new finance minister said in March that Ghana’s economy was in “severe distress.”
The cathedral was designed by the celebrity architect David Adjaye. But beyond the blueprints, there is very little to show for the money.
“They have only dug a hole — a big hole,” Praise Chinedu, a student and a Pentecostal Christian, said last month.
A well-thumbed Bible tucked under his arm, he was emerging from a morning service at Pure Fire Miracles Ministries onto a street humming with churchgoers, ice cream vendors and clamoring children. His brother John, who had been buying anointing oil, sidled up. “God is not going to be happy,” he said.
A rendering of the exterior of the cathedral project.
A rendering of the interior.