One Minister + One Year = Six Houses

Months of painstaking investigations and surveillance by Ghana Palaver Research Team and undercover reporters have finally paid off – and the paper has struck pay dirt!

Professor Mike Ocquaye, NPP MP for Dome-Kwabenya, Minister of Energy, former Ghana’s High Commissioner to India for three years, and former lecturer at the University of Ghana and rumoured NPP Presidential aspirant for the 2008 elections has built or is building six mighty mansions in the one year that he has been back from his Ambassadorial position in New Delhi, India.

That is not all. In the process, Government vehicles, notably vehicles of the ECG, have been freely utilized on this purely private project. The financial loss involved cannot be immediately calculated. Indeed our informants at Professor Mike Ocquaye’s project sites inform us that the vehicles in question have since been auctioned to the Minister, and they are permanently parked at the project sites.

If you add a family house at Osu that the Minister has pulled down and is rebuilding into a mansion along the lines of the Taj Mahal which he must be seen for the first time when he went to represent HIPC Ghana in New Delhi , that will make seven houses in one year. These seven houses do not include his present house at Haatso, in which he resides.

House No.s 1-3 – House No. One(1) is built in the style of the Ghana High Commission Complex in New Delhi, India, a truly magnificent, palatial edifice.  The house is situated in the Selase area of Dome-Kwabenya near Top Herbal at Agbogba. It is a 3-in-1, two-storey house, adjacent to a house belonging to Alhaji Lukman where Vice President Aliu Mahama is a regular night visitor, normally in the company of non-spousal acquaintances. House No. One (1) is therefore actually a complex of three houses.

House No. 4 is at Supermarket Junction, Haatso, opposite Cherith JSS Preparatory School. It is a magnificent two-story building with a gate that could rival that of Jerusalem. Though a two-storey building, the eastern wing is actually a 3-story building. It is still under construction.

House No. Five (5) – This house is being built directly opposite Professor Ocquaye’s present residence at Haatso. It is comparatively modest and would conservatively be valued at around ¢3billion.

House No. Six (6) – Professor Mike Ocquaye’s 6th house is at Ecomog, near Haatso, opposite House No.111. It is a massive, two-storey-dome-like structure, which is still under construction. According to information from the neighbours, Professor Ocquaye is building House No. 6 for his wife in whose name it is registered and with whom he has no child.

House No. Seven (7) is yet to be confirmed but Ghana Palaver is informed that it involves Professor Mike Ocquaye’s family house at Osu. The information is that the Professor has pulled down the entire family house and is rebuilding it to the taste of an Oriental nabob with Saudi Arabian extravagance.

The other disturbing information is that Professor Ocquaye is indulging in all this opulence with a bit of theft of Government service on the side. Workers at the Professor’s various housing project sites, confirmed by pictures of the sites taken by Ghana Palaver, show Government vehicles pressed into serving carting stones, cement and other building materials and the workmen to and from the work sites. All the vehicles belong to the ECG (under the Ministry of Energy, where Professor Ocquaye is the Minister.

The concern the electorate of Dome-Kwabenya are raising is this:- Professor Mike Ocquaye may be a political scientist, a lawyer, a lecturer, a former ambassador and all that. Why did he have to wait until becoming MP and Minister in as ‘lucrative’ a sector as Energy before embarking on this massive acquisition spree, reminiscent of the days of ‘amassing wealth” under the NRC/SMC regimes, a period that Professor Ocquaye has criticized so harshly in his books. The Professor’s constituents in Dome-Kwabenya say they cannot answer that question.