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
Across Accra, Ghana’s coastal capital, citizens joke that the hole is the biggest and most expensive in the world. A valuable stretch of land surrounded by museums, bank headquarters and some of Ghana’s ritziest hotels was cleared of government buildings for the church. That land is now thick with vegetation and bird life, unvisited except by scrap metal thieves and, occasionally in the rainy season, swimmers staging stunts for social media.
Now that Mr. Akufo-Addo has left office, the project appears permanently doomed.
The cathedral is now a major target of the new government’s anticorruption initiative, called Operation Recover All Loot. Last month, the government announced it would no longer fund the project and dissolved the agency responsible for managing it.
Africa is home to the world’s largest Christian population. Ghana, where faith is especially important to young people, has seen a recent boom in church building.
But the national cathedral project never attracted the support Mr. Akufo-Addo anticipated. Instead, construction stalled at its foundations as Ghana suffered its worst economic crisis in a generation.
