The Parliamentary Service has clarified the recent statement on the residence of the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, stating that the Speaker did not say his residence has been sold. 

It said the Speaker stated that there was an attempt to sell his official residence, which he referred to during the Speaker’s Breakfast Forum in Accra, on Monday, November 20, 2023.

It said the potential buyer proceeded to the Lands Commission for the necessary due diligence and realised the status of the property and that was when the Speaker got to know about it.

“The Rt. Hon. Speaker did not say that the Speaker’s official residence had been sold.

What he said was that it was almost sold.

“The reactions by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, the Ministry of Works and Housing and the Lands Commission so far have not tackled the subject matter of the alleged sale,” a statement signed by the Director, Media Relations Department of the Parliamentary Service, David Sebastian Damoah, said.

Lands Commission

This was in response to the Lands Commission denying knowledge of a purported sale of the official residence of the Speaker of Parliament to a private developer.

A statement signed by the acting Executive Secretary of the Lands Commission, Benjamin Arthur, last Tuesday said it was “unaware of any purported sale of the Speaker of Parliament’s official residence to a private developer”.

It said records available to the commission indicated that the land in question was acquired in 1920 by a Certificate of Title, dated June 7, 1920, for government services.

It added that since 2003, the land had always been used as the official residence of the Speaker of Parliament.  

“By an application dated November 15, 2022, and numbered PS/LS/002/12/22, the Parliamentary Service applied for a Certificate of Allocation to regularise their occupation of the land, which measures approximately 1.66 acres,” it said, among other things.

Investigations

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Service has, however, welcomed the decision by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources to investigate the matter and expressed the hope that the investigations would establish who attempted to sell, and who the potential buyer was.

Transparency in the matter, it said, was of utmost importance for the sake of public confidence in state institutions.

The statement said a visit to the official residence of the Speaker would unveil that almost all the surrounding buildings and accompanying parcels of land had been sold out to private developers and that high-rise apartments had been constructed all around, “leaving the Speaker’s residence as an island and endangering the safety and security of the Rt. Hon. Speaker”.

“A trip down memory lane reveals that sometime in 2019, the official accommodation of a sitting Clerk to Parliament located in Cantonments was sold to a private developer.

Other properties assigned to Parliament have suffered a similar fate,” it said.

Source: GraphicOnline