¢1.5bn to renovate deserted speaker’s house

A whopping amount of 1. 5 billion old Ghana cedis is to be splashed on the official residence of the Speaker of Parliament to get it back in shape.

When a former Speaker of Parliament, Ebenezer Sekyie-Hughes, packed out of his plush Cantonments official residence in early 2009, he left behind what was previously described by then Majority Leader, Alban Bagbin, as “a huge and embarrassing mess”.

The retired chief of the Legislature stripped the residence bare; taking with him almost every single soft furnishing in the imposing edifice, built on a large parcel of land about 150 meters away from the Togolese Embassy.

Over three years on, the Mills administration The Globe newspaper understands, intends to open up the national kitty and fork out more than a billion cedis of tax payers’ money to, according to a senior member of the Parliamentary Service Board, “repair the severe structural damages caused by the disgraced former Speaker’s indiscretion, which has become a subject of never ending investigations by the Criminal Investigations Department. ”

A guarded Public Works Department (PWD) documents cited by The Globe show it will cost the taxpayer more than 800 million old Ghana cedis to renovate the entire edifice. But, officials say the projected cost of putting the looted property back in shape could climb further up given that the estimates were prepared more than a year ago.

The Globe’s investigations revealed that although the former Speaker returned many of the items he took out of the house after heavy public criticism and intense pressure from the Parliamentary Service Board many of the household objects suffered breakages and damages. Our source, pleading anonymity, said “. ..conservatively, it will cost the state nearly a billion cedis to replace soft furnishings the former Speaker removed from the house.”

The projected sum total of the planned renovation of the official residence reserved for the nation’s third most powerful public servants is more than twice the money government needs to build classrooms to properly accommodate hundreds of rural school pupil who study under trees, receiving frequent visits from stray domestic animals, poisonous snakes and other wild creatures.

“We have already written to the Public Procurement to allow us to engage the Public Works Department to work on the building,” said Kofi Safo-Duodu, Director of Development at the nation’s Parliament, when contacted by The Globe. He, however, declined to give details of how much money his office intends to use to refurnish the emptied state propertied.

“Please I will not talk about refurnishing that house...,” he said and pleaded not to be drawn into the controversial subject of how much of tax cedi the state intends to sink into making the residence inhabitable once more.

But, pressed by this reporter for more details on the exact renovation works to be carried out, he said hesitantly: “We intend to repaint the entire house and repair the deep cracks on parts of the building. Additionally, the mosaic around the swimming pool is coming off and we need to fix that by laying new tiles around the pool. Work will also be done on the outhouse, the gym, the kitchen and so on to put them back in shape....”

When The Globe visited the residence recently, there were workers laying pavement block in front of the edifice. There were signs of some additional works going on inside the house. But Safo-Duodu told this reporter that “no work has been done on the property yet because we are yet to receive the go ahead from the Procurement Authority to contract the PWD to do the renovation.

“The only people who recently worked around that area National Fibre Optic Cable people who wrote to us to allow them to remove the pavement blocks in front of the building in order to lay their cables,” he added.

Although the former speaker’s alleged criminal conduct was widely publicised by the Mills administration, same cannot be said of the Parliamentary Service Board’s moves to put back in shape the residence he reportedly stripped bare upon leaving office.