Investigate construction of Veep villa — PNC

The People’s National Convention (PNC), has called for an immediate enquiry into the processes leading to the construction of a new bungalow for the Vice- President by the previous National Democratic Congress (NDC) government.

The uncompleted bungalow generated controversy after the Vice- President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, announced that the bungalow was to cost close to $14 million.

A document from the Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL), the engineering company working on the vice-presidential Villa, emerged with a purported breakdown of $13.9 million said to be expenditure on the bungalow.

The General Secretary of the PNC, Mr Atik Mohammed, described the $13.9 million figure as absurd and said he was firmly behind calls for an investigation into the construction of the villa.

An amount of “13.9 million, by all accounts, is not a joke. Somebody must be explaining to us whether we are building an Arabian palace. If it is not a palace for an Arabian king, I do not think that $13.9 million is a small amount and we ought to know how we came to that figure,” he said in a Citi News interview.

The NDC has come out to deny the claimed $13.9 million figure, saying only $5.9 million had been invested in the project. Regardless of the cost, Mr Mohammed said expenditure on the villa was symptomatic of the country’s misplaced priorities.

“I think that whether it is 5.9 or 13.9, whichever figure it is, even though I strongly believe that the amount is 13.9, I think that this is unfortunate, considering the state of our economy. There are other areas of priority these resources could have  been channelled into, yet the erstwhile administration found it prudent to rather invest this much into the construction of a Vice- Presidential villa.”