<\/p>\n
Finance Minister Ken Ofori- Atta has asked opposers of the National Cathedral project to be measured in their criticisms.<\/p>\n
He says government is mindful of taxpayers\u2019 money being used to support the building of the National Cathedral and is strategizing to ensure that monies pumped into the construction are recouped within the shortest possible time after construction.<\/p>\n
For him, the current economic challenges should not deter the state from fulfilling its responsibility to build a monument that has huge investment potential.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt any point in time when these buildings were built in Europe, was it ever the right time? How do we fund it will become the question. Is the executive mindful of the current situation?\u00a0<\/span>We shouldn\u2019t snuff out our religiousness or spirituality because we are poor\u201d, he said on state broadcaster, GTV on Sunday.<\/p>\n Government is under pressure to abort its ambition for the National Cathedral project, given the country\u2019s economic downturn and tough times being faced by the citizenry.<\/p>\n This was after it emerged government recently released GH\u00a225 million to the National Cathedral Secretariat as additional seed money for the project.<\/p>\n But the Finance Minister believes the raging debate on the financial prudence and relevance of the National Cathedral is misguided.<\/p>\n \u201cThat question being asked is that are we spending money from state coffers? Is that too much to do because we are politicizing it. Do we really want to stop it? That is going to be my question.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Ken Ofori- Atta, rather, wants critics not to lose sight of the real returns the National Cathedral project could generate to shore up government\u2019s revenue target.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a Minister of Finance, we are looking at resources and how much we put in there at every point in time that is sensible and so as we speak, we have spent less than one-thousandth of our expenditure on that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI am very confident of raising revenue to be able to fund this and then more importantly if I want to look into the economics of it, I truly see an overwhelming capacity that this will pay off. Typically, I am looking at an internal rate of return, so we should put this in mind\u201d, the Minister added.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Finance Minister Ken Ofori- Atta has asked opposers of the National Cathedral project to be measured in their criticisms. He says government is mindful of taxpayers\u2019 money being used to support the building of the National Cathedral and is strategizing to ensure that monies pumped into the construction are recouped within the shortest possible time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1119624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[8458,913,1093,1367,4086],"class_list":["post-1119619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-cathedral","tag-investment","tag-national","tag-pay","tag-potential"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}