Political critic Kwesi Pratt has men-tioned that Ghana’s past experience with privatisation should make public officials cautious about transferring state enterprises into private hands.
He said nearly 500 enterprises and industries established under Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, were eventually moved from state ownership to private hands after the 1966 change of government.
According to Mr Pratt, many of those enterprises were operating when they were under state management but later collapsed after privatisation.
“Close to 500 enterprises, industries established by the Nkrumah government have been killed in private hands,” he said on Metro TV.
He cited the former Ambassador Hotel and Continental Hotel as examples of enterprises that were privatised but ended up under foreign state ownership.
The former Ambassador Hotel was bought by an Arab state, while the former Continental Hotel, which became Golden Tulip and later Lancaster, was bought by the Libyan government, he said.
Mr Pratt also cited the former Tema Shipyard and Drydock, which was sold to Malaysian investors but later deteriorated to the point where former President John Evans Atta Mills decided to repossess it.
He said Ghana had also lost skilled personnel from the facility after engineers and other workers were recruited to Singapore, where they later worked on shipbuilding projects.
“They came and recruited all of them, took them to Singapore. Now they are building ships that we go and buy. Unbelievable,” he said.
For Mr Pratt, the history of these enterprises shows that privatisation cannot automatically resolve problems within public institutions.
