Mahama facilitated grant for building of National Mosque – Sammy Gyamfi claims

In the midst of the controversy that has dogged the building of the National Cathedral, the National Mosque and the purported role of the then government in building it has often been cited.

The latest to mention the facility located at Kanda in a Cathedral discussion is Communications Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress, Sammy Gyamfi, who claims former President John Dramani Mahama facilitated Turkish government support to help build the facility.

Making submissions on a political talk show on Peace FM, June 27, 2022; Sammy Gyamfi slammed President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for the controversies that have bedeviled the project and claimed that government should have allowed the Christian faithful to adopt the funding model Muslims supposedly used.

“This particular Cathedral, there are a lot of issues with it because of how President Akufo-Addo personalized it from the outset.

“It is not as if the churches and Christians came up to put efforts together just as our Muslim brothers sometime ago came together to build the National Mosque, so (that) the government should help by playing a certain facilitating role.

“So, when President Mahama came into office, his first trip was to Turkey to facilitate that grant from the Turkish government to build that mosque,” he claimed.

Reports have stated that the National Mosque was not built by a Turkish government grant but by a Non-Governmental Organization.

The issue of government involvement by way of facilitation has also been dismissed as untrue, that the NGO built the structure without any state involvement.

COMOG disputes similar assertion

Earlier this month, the Coalition of Muslim Organizations, Ghana (COMOG) challenged a similar claim by Dr. Opoku-Mensah of the National Cathedral of Ghana when he made statements on GBC’s Talking Point programme to the effect that government played a facilitating role in construction of the National Mosque.

After a Monday, June 13, 2022 statement by COMOG disputing the claims, Dr. Opoku-Mensah issued an apology and retracted the said comments.

“What I had been informed was ‘facilitation’ – but not ‘state resources’ – did not actually happen. I retract, and apologize, for the use of ‘state facilitation’ in my response, and deeply regret the pain it might have caused the COMOG and the Muslim Umma in Ghana,” the CEO pleaded.

While Dr Opoku-Mensah’s claim was in justification of the government’s decision to advance state money in support of the construction of the National Cathedral, the President of COMOG, Hajj Abdel-Manan Abdel Rahman in a statement called his claims a deliberate falsehood.

Watch Sammy Gyamfi’s submission on the National Cathedral below: