Ghana Earns Billions From Divestiture

The government of Ghana has since its divestiture programme of state- owned companies between 1989 and August this year earned billions of cedis, and millions in treasured foreign currencies.

According to a compilation by our Business Desk on public records published by the Divestiture Implementation Committee (DIC) in the two state-owned dailies-Daily Graphic and The Ghanaian Times, the DIC earned for the country about 70 million cedis, USD 117 million, 8 million Deutsche marks, 3.5 million pounds and 21 million French francs. The DIC is however yet to recover 12 billion cedis and USD 43 million.

328 companies have been divested under the programme believed to have been launched under the marching orders of the International Monetary Fund as one its conditionalities for providing assistance for Ghana's troubled economy of the 1980s. Most of the state-owned companies were established during the First Republic and the Acheampong regime.

For some financial analysts, most of the state-owned corporation were performing creditably until the 1966 coup d'etat when an ideological shift in the affairs of Ghana brought a bad patch to those firms. For others the debate over the divestiture of state-owned companies outside the ideological issue is over whether the massive divestiture initiated by the PNDC when Dr. Kwesi Botchwey, was the Minister of Finance has made any major contribution to the economic development of the country.

This view is made against the background that receipts from the sale of some of the government's share in Ashanti Goldfields Company (AGC) did not achieve economic development in the country.