Flagstaff House to be renamed – Hamid

Ghana's Flagstaff House is to be renamed in the coming days, Minister-designate for Information, Mustapha Hamid has disclosed.

The edifice was christened Jubilee House by the Kufuor administration following its construction to commemorate Ghana’s 50th independence anniversary but was renamed Flagstaff House in 2009 by the Atta Mills government. But with the return of the New Patriotic party to power, there is talk that the facility’s original name – Jubilee House – will be restored.

Speaking on Newsfile on Joy FM on Saturday January 14, Mr Hamid, who still refers to the presidential palace as Jubilee House, said the name Flagstaff House would soon be changed.

Mr Hamid told host Samson Lardy Anyenini: “We have not referred to it by any other name other than the name that the original builders of it intended for it and the reason why President Kufuor named it Jubilee House was for good …

“It is an edifice that we built for ourselves in our jubilee year, in our 50th year anniversary – that is significant. Number two, we said to ourselves that after 50 years of independence it was not correct for us to continue to live in a slave edifice. So we said let’s leave that slave and colonial edifice and get an edifice that will define our independence as humans. Now you come into that new edifice and call it Flagstaff House, which itself is a colonial imposition.

Flagstaff houses are commonwealth houses of our colonial masters and so on and so forth, so I didn’t get the NDC’s logic or perhaps they didn’t understand that we built this edifice because we wanted to get away from the colonialism and the negativity associated with it.”

Asked if government had any intention of changing the name, the Islamic scholar said: “It will change soon but I don’t know how soon.”