Winter is coming: controversial project to be finished before Ramadan

A “winter corner” for the capital’s showpiece park will be finished before Ramadan, Housing Minister Mohamed Muizzu has said.

The frosty feature, boasting the Maldives first and only ice-rink, was absent when the revamped Rasrani Bageecha park opened to much fanfare last year.

Muizzu had said the winter corner would be ready by the end of 2016 for the “social well-being” of Maldivians.

“Some may question how one might build a winter area in Maldives,” he said more than two years ago. “But it has been done in countries like ours. By the will of god, we will build it in a way that resembles a cold country and duplicates the feeling of being in a cold country.”

The project was ridiculed and criticised, with people describing it as a distraction to hide the government’s failure to address real social problems.

Muizzu explained on state TV why there was a delay to the unveiling of the icy attraction.

“A lot of tests need to be done to see how we can sustain the temperature in Malé,” he said. “It is getting delayed because it is being built in a very different way. The area will have a snow machine that will let people experience winter. Ice-skating will also be possible.”

Neither MTCC, the state-owned company contracted to build the winter corner, nor the housing ministry have revealed the cost of the project.

Can the @MMuizzu also comment on how much public money is being spent on this?!
So many young people, so many families are unable to afford 3 meals a day in this country, crammed into apartments the size of match boxes, and this is how govt spends money!https://t.co/zGUYQTUz7h

— Ib Nawaf 🎈 (@ib_nawaf) March 10, 2018

Muizzu tweeted on Saturday that money was not being spent from the state budget and it was being funded by CSR from the tourism sector.