Kufuor government sold railway lines as 'scrap metal' - Spio-Garbrah

The Kufuor administration sold Ghana’s railway lines to Indians as scrap metal, former Minister of Trade and Industry Ekwow Spio-Garbrah has said.

According to him, that practice affected Ghana’s railway sector during the Kufuor administration and so wondered why the Akufo-Addo government of the same New Patriotic Party (NPP) would improve the lot of the rail sector by bringing back the Ministry of Railways as pertained in the Kufuor government.

“You create Ministry of Railways again, because under the first Kufuor administration, they created that Ministry of Railways. What did they do?: I would be at the CTO in London travelling around in the commonwealth and Indians would approach me in Australia and in Malaysia and they would say: ‘Oh we would like to buy railway lines in Ghana. The metal was being sold to Indians as scrap metal under President Kufuor,” Mr Spio-Garbrah said in an interview with Accra-based Radio XYZ on Tuesday.

He said the Kufuor government “didn’t add one meter of railway line to Ghana’s railway stock … even though they had a Minister at the Ministry of Railways.”

In his estimation, it is during the Mills and Mahama administrations that Ghana’s rail sector saw some level of development.

“It’s under President Mahama and President Mills – President Mills actually did the Accra-Tema Railway line, if you remember, and President Mahama did the Kojokrom-Sekondi Takoradi railway extension. I sat in the air-conditioned train that Mahama put in place in the Western Region and which is extending all the way to Accra, so, if this government can do that simply by creating a Ministry of Railways, fine, but we don’t believe the creation of new ministries … adds to the amount of sense or commonsense that a government has; you don’t increase the quantum of ideas and commonsense of the government simply by the number of ministries you’ve created…” the presidential hopeful added.