A homegrown dispute in Sir David Adjaye’s native Ghana is boiling over after news that the architect could be asked to repay some $21.3 million in fees associated with the firm’s National Cathedral design, which politicians from the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) party claim is part of a sole-sourced tender process that has favored the architect for a number of years.
The online news site GhanaWeb has reported several stories recently in relation to the efforts of MP Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, a member of the NDC, who is insisting that the 10.5% design fee asked by Adjaye Associates at the project’s inception in 2018 was never formally approved by the governing body. The politician also claims the Cathedral will not be completed by its originally planned 2024 date – the same year the country is set to hold a presidential election upon which, he says, the project's status most likely relies on.
As first reported in designboom, the fees in question were in fact approved the same year as the announcement by the country’s Public Procurement Authority.
The issue came to the fore only last year when another DNC MP filed a lawsuit against the government of President Nana Akufo-Addo in which he claimed “at no point was there an open call for bids from other members of the Chartered Institute of Architects, despite sending out announcements for competitive bids” for the massive Agenda 111 development scheme.
In addition to David Adjaye’s 12.5% charge for his original design which amounted to US$21.37million (after a trade discount), he separately charged Ghana for the later “design of the integration of a Bible Museum & Biblical Gardens” which was paid out of US$25million seed money. pic.twitter.com/U5o6LORvLY
— Sam Okudzeto Ablakwa (@S_OkudzetoAblak) June 20, 2022
Additionally, Ablakwa has tweeted what appears to be evidence supporting claims about an additional, undisclosed payment that was advanced to Adjaye at the end of October for the “design of the integration of a Bible Museum & Biblical Gardens” on the Cathedral project.
The question of whether Adjaye, whose father served in prominent positions in the Ghanian government generations ago, is, in effect, creating a glass ceiling for other architects in the designer-savvy West African country was further taken up by IMANI Africa VP Bright Simons, who listed five total projects (including the National Cathedral and Agenda 111 schemes) equaling over $300 million in fees.
Twitter post via @fanti_boy.
“There is this new pattern whereby the government is consistently single-sourcing large projects to a single architect (Sir David Adjaye), it is unusual." Simons said during a recent television appearance. "We have never seen these in this country... what has all of a sudden changed? We appreciate the fact that Sir David Adjaye is a global architect and internationally renowned, [but]… how can we award the Ghana Trade Fair Centre, which he will be paid $300 million at the current rate? We are going to pay him another $100 [million] for Agenda 111 project using the same scaling fee he has been applying. By the time we are through, we will have paid a single architect more than $300 million as a country. Somebody must ask some questions.”
Adjaye and his team have not issue any public statements on the allegations so far.
11 Comments
$300 million? All the big projects going to one foreign architect?
Sounds fishy.
300 million $ fee is totally improbable. That must be the project fee
Project Cost I meant
What a shame... I thought he was one of the few good guys.
Didn't realize Adjaye hailed from a prominent political family himself.
Don't all of the big names come from a family like that?
Well I suppose it's not much a surprise, given how prohibitively expensive architectural education is. It's just that with all the talk about him repping African design, I assumed Adjaye came from a middle class family rather than political royalty. It must have been my bias.
These are allegations, not facts. We should wait to see whether there’s anything to this. Note that there hasn’t been any specific evidence shown at this time. 12.5% isn’t an outrageous fee, either.
"These are allegations, not facts" ... or so you allege. maybe they are facts.
koww, I hope you never experience having your professional reputation tarnished by an unsubstantiated allegation. I’ve seen this happen before, when an architect is accused of incompetence or malfeasance by a politician without evidence. More often than not, when the truth finally surfaces, you won’t see the politician apologize or retract their erroneous statements, and the architect is left trying to rebuild their professional reputation. Our reputation is all we have as professionals, so it’s imperative to make sure we have the facts before attacking another architect. We do no favors to the profession or society by jumping to conclusions.
The fee in itself is not that surprising, but it going to a single firm? That's the dubious part.
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