Private legal practitioner and energy analyst Nana Kwame Juantuah has pushed against the privatisation of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), emphasising that the energy sector is very crucial to be handed over to private persons to manage.
His opposition follows fresh calls by the Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II for the diversification of some state-owned companies, including the ECG, to ensure effective service delivery.
“VRA and others are all government establishments, let’s give it out and diversify to the private sector and then we inject money in there, and get the right people to do it…Electricity Company [of Ghana] is in a situation where we don’t know but that also must be diverse and give it to the private sector,” said the Asantehene.
But Kwame Juantuah, in an interview on TV3 News 360 on Wednesday, April 17, expressed concerns about the state’s apparent failure in the management of public institutions.
“The energy sector is an important sector to the country and cannot be given to any private sector. The government has to run it and if government is going to run it, they need to do it well. The people who we put in these partakers to work should not be nominated by the president. That is a huge mistake.
“We’ve got the Public Services Commission, people should apply, and those who apply should be industry people who can run the place,” he advocated.
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Kwame Juantuah further argued that if the country should have an international private sector to take up ECG, the country will be on the losing end.
“Who are we giving it to? What private sector are we giving it to? Is it the local private sector? or is it the international private sector?
“Any international company that comes to Ghana to take over any of our parastatals has personal interest and no personal friend. Sometimes they sideline your own people who are working and they pay them peanuts,” he told Martin Asiedu Dartey.
He also chastised the government for failing to acknowledge the erstwhile Mahama administration for procuring the AMERI power plants, now rebranded as the Kumasi 1 Thermal Power Plant.
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