Judges’ Homes and Government Offices Pulled Down: Ghana Clears Prime Ridge Land for a 5,000-Seat National Cathedral

• About 50 state buildings in Accra’s Ridge area were marked for demolition
• The land is being cleared for a 5,000-seat National Cathedral
• Court of Appeal judges were moved out of homes built only five years earlier
• Temporary housing for the judges was put at $168,000 for 18 months

Excavators returned to the Ridge area of Accra in August 2019 for a second phase of demolitions on state land set aside for Ghana’s National Cathedral. GhanaWeb reported that six buildings came down on a single Wednesday morning, part of roughly 50 state offices and residential apartments cleared from the Ridge roundabout towards the Scholarship Secretariat, the Judicial Training Institute and the Passport Office.

Among those displaced were Court of Appeal judges, whose residences had been built by the Judicial Service only five years earlier. The judges were given temporary housing at state expense, at a reported cost of $168,000 for 18 months. Workers on the site said they “were under strict instructions from their boss” but would not discuss the timetable.

The project was announced on 6 March 2017. Designed by the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, the cathedral is planned to seat 5,000 people and to include chapels, a baptistery, a music school, an art gallery and a Bible museum. Fundraising was launched on 28 December 2018, when the president contributed 100,000 cedis. A constitutional challenge to the government’s involvement in building a cathedral had been dismissed by the Supreme Court.

The story is less about one church than about how public land is used. Buildings that taxpayers had paid for, some of them barely five years old, were demolished to make room for a religious project, and the state then paid again to house the officials who had lived in them.

Jamaica has had its own arguments about the state and church property, from tax exemptions to the public purse funding church repairs. Ghana’s cathedral shows the stakes when government land and government money are committed to a place of worship: the value of what is given up has to be counted as well as the value of what is built. For diaspora Jamaicans who watch these debates from abroad, the question to ask of any church-state property deal is simple: who owns the land afterwards, and who pays?

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