Accra, July 25, GNA - The Integrated Social Development Centre
(ISODEC), a civil society group, in solidarity with other groups, has urged
Parliament to act in the supreme interest of Ghana and halt the proposed sale of the Ghana Telecommunications Company (GT). "Ghana stands at a crossroads over GT, as Parliament prepares to
ratify or not to ratify the deal, ISODEC wishes to remind the august house
to be guided in their deliberation, by nothing but the supreme interest
of Ghana," the Centre said in a statement issued in Accra on Friday. Government of Ghana has proposed to sell 70 per cent shares of
Ghana Telecom to Vodafone, a British phone company for US$ 900
million, but the deal has been met with strong resistance from minority
parties and civil society groups, calling for abrogation of the
proposed sale.
Signed by Dr Steve Manteaw, the release called on Parliamentarians to rise up to their oversight responsibility and ensure that Ghana would not be short-changed in the GT-Vodafone transaction.
ISODEC was of the view that the GT-Vodafone saga "raises a
number of concerns bordering on transparency, accountability,
protection of the national interest" and most importantly "brought to
the fore the need to evaluate the usefulness of such exercises".
"The study is yet to be conducted in country but the few that have
been done at the continental level indicate that privatization is not always the best option."
Citing a 2003 study by Thierry Buchs, a Senior Economist of the International Finance Corporation, ISODEC, maintained that even though turnover and profitability had generally increased following privatization, the evidence had been mixed regarding the sustainability of the initial post-privatisation upswing.
It recounted job losses and the fact that privatization had created new political patronage opportunities, leading to numerous corruption scandals.
The Centre complained that privatization in Ghana had often been done without a proper evaluation of its impact on the nation in terms of development aspirations, and added that "our governments have often failed to appreciate what constitutes the national interest ..
They have often indiscriminately bundled state assets, sometimes including well performing ones, and sold them just to balance the national budget. It is not clear what else we will sell when the last national asset has been sold." ISODEC described as lame and untenable the arguments
advanced in favour of the GT sale to attract new technology and
managerial skill. It endorsed the re-capitalisation of GT through the Ghana Stock
Exchange or, or "where the needed capital cannot be raised on the
local stock exchange, we can have a mixed financing plan that
includes the stock exchange". "If it is about raising capital, experience has shown that the Ghana Stock Exchange can provide the solution in most of the cases."
ISODEC said: "Simple arithmetic reveals that an average subscription of $100 per person, it will take five million of Ghana's 22 million population, to raise the needed $500 million new capital for GT, and this is not in five years proposed by Vodafone but less than a year.
"On the question of management skills, we cannot doubt the capacity of the Ghanaian manager, especially when we compare the results with their conditions of service."
While condemning privatization as bad, ISODEC said it believed the time had come to re-think privatization within the scheme of the
national development strategy, and a whole new national orientation to
recognize the potential of the Ghanaian. The Centre advised that the nation should begin to see
privatization as an opportunity to transform national assets, and said
the notion that "a government has no business being in business is totally misplaced". "A lot of successful Chinese companies doing business the world
over, including Ghana, are either state-owned or partly owned by the Chinese Government."
