The Minority in Parliament has stated that the budgetary allocation for the Ministry for Tourism will be approved without the GH₵80 million cedis allocated to fund the construction of the National Cathedral project.

The Trade and Industry Committee last week blocked the allocation but with barely 48 hours to go on break, the Tourism Ministry is desperate to have their allocation approved even if it’s without the GH₵80 million for the cathedral.

Explaining that Minority’s hesitance to approve the fund, the Ranking Member on the Trades and Industry Committee, Armah Kofi Buah says the Committee is not satisfied with the documentation provided.

“The Ministry of Tourism came and they couldn’t give us the answers we needed. In terms of the itemized list of what that GH₵80 million was for. We sent them back and they brought the cathedral secretariat. Well, we asked them to give us every detail, every sub-contractor, and how those contracts were awarded. They brought us some documents unfortunately after we perused the documents, they could only account for about GH₵225 million,” he said.

He added that, per the document the National Cathedral Secretariat submitted on the GH₵225 million cedis, there is an unaccounted figure of GH₵114 million cedis.

“We are going to approve the Ministry of Tourism Budget, but we on the Minority will not approve the GH₵80 million, because we are not satisfied with how the GH₵339 million has been expended. We are not clearly convinced how the 80 million cedis will be spent,” he said.

According to the Ellembelle MP, the Minority is not also convinced about the need to allocate $383 million to complete the project.

He added that the Finance Ministry could not also justify the use of the contingency vault.