Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing Alban Bagbin has denied media reports that he has a baby outside wedlock. The story had it that he had a two-and-a-half-year-old baby with another woman who lives at the Central Hotel near the British High Commission and the Ghana Institute of Journalism.

Rumours also suggest that the lady in question lives in Takoradi and visits the Minister in Accra where she is put in a hotel until she goes back to her base. It is also claimed that the minister has procured a house for her in the name of the baby, where a second baby is expected because the woman at the centre of the allegation is carrying another pregnancy for the minister.

But Mr. Bagbin said he had been traumatized and shocked, because he knew nothing about the said baby and her mother. The Works and Housing Minister said, “I have no lady friend, second wife and a two-and-a-half-year old baby boy, who was a guest at Central Hotel located close to the British High Commission and the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) at North Ridge in Accra.”

Narrating his association with the said hotel, Mr. Bagbin said both the proprietor and the manager of the facility were what he referred to as his Northern brothers. He explained that he worked with the manager in the defunct Continental Hotel (now Golden Tulip Hotel) Accra in 1983.

According to him, even though he had visited the facility since 1993 to date, he never acquired a hotel room there nor met a lady friend as reported by a newspaper recently. “I am very hurt, shocked and traumatized by the publications. I know both the proprietor and the manager of the hotel in question. They are both Northern brothers and close friends.”

He denied any closeness to a lady at the hotel, let alone meeting her in the presence of a gentleman as reported. “No lady guest has ever been close to me and no such lady has been invited to a gentleman in the Hotel in my presence,” he said. Having been in Accra and attending to his official duties daily, Mr. Bagbin said, he left Accra at 7am Thursday, 3rd November 2011 by Antrak Air for Tamale to chair the Steering Committee meeting on the implementation of a Canada-sponsored Northern Region Small Towns Water project (NORST). He stated that the meeting started at 9am on same day and ended well after 7pm. “I am the honorable Member of Parliament for Nadowli West Constituency, a former majority Leader of the Parliament of Ghana and the current Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing. So you know where to get me,” he queried the source of the scathing story.

He also denied that efforts were made to get in touch with him to no avail, describing the statement as spurious. The two publications on the subject, according to him, have caused himself, family, party and government “immeasurable and irreparable damage.”

Turning to God for an intercession, he said, “I have, together with my wife and family, been so scandalized and traumatized that we believe only the Good Lord can intercede to prevent the unimaginable.”