Vice President Of the IMANI Africa, Bright Simons says the alleged amount of money paid to Sir David Adjaye & Associates Ltd for the National Cathedral project is monstrous.
Speaking to JoyNews on Saturday, July 18, Mr Simons touted that the money paid by the President to Sir David as project fee is much higher than the actual stipulated architectural fee.
He further mentioned that the project fee charged in the United Kingdom is 3.5%.
For him, the fee charged by Sir David Adjaye & Associates Ltd is an inflationary pricing which must be probed.
“We are quite surprised to learn that a huge amount of money is been given to Sir David Adjaye affront on top of the money he’s charged from the documents we have now of $22 million which was nearly10% of project cost is monstrous. As the scale of the project increases the percentage reduces because it is natural If you are going to do a ten billion dollar project, I don’t have to pay $10 billion to the architecture.
“So, that scaling dynamics means that the average percentage for project cost and you will typically find in the United Kingdom is about 3.5%. We have a situation where we are paying not just for designs to be very clear, we are paying almost 10% to Sir Davide Agyei for this exercise for the country and nobody doubts his talent but this is inflationary pricing which we must talk about.”
His assertion comes after the Member of Parliament for North Tongu, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, in a Facebook post stated that an amount of GHS32million was paid to Sir David Adjaye & Associates Ltd for the National Cathedral project.
According to the MP, this amount was paid to the company by President Akufo-Addo in 2021 for its consultancy services.
Bright Simons, reacting to the amount paid to the aforementioned company stated that the fee is more than the accepted standard thus breaches the Ghana Institute of Architecture fee structure.
“And here also I find it shocking that we will be breaching the Ghana institute of Architect fee structure which is around 4 % and we are paying about 10%. What is it about Sir Davide Agyei that we must pay so much when the project scale is such that typically we need to comply with guidance because it is a big project,” he quizzed.
He also questioned why the Akufo-Addo government kept single-sourcing project to Sir David Adjaye & Associates Ltd.
He said projects awarded to the company raises an eyebrow.
“This new pattern whereby the government is consistently single sourcing large projects to a single architect is unusual . we have never had this in this country before and it raises an eyebrow.”
Discussion about this post