Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Isaac Nii Moi Thompson, says Ghana’s long history of privatisation has failed to deliver the expected development benefits, raising serious questions about accountability and corruption.
Appearing on Good Morning Ghana on Metro TV on Thursday, January 15, 2026, Dr Thompson said the country’s approach to privatisation has been flawed from the very beginning.
“Even privatisation, we’ve so mishandled it since 1966,” he said.
“Don’t forget we started it after Nkrumah was overthrown,” he noted.
According to him, decades after major state assets were sold off, it remains unclear how the proceeds were used and whether they translated into meaningful national development.
“Sometimes you ask yourself, what happened to all the money?” he said. “What did we even do with the proceeds from privatisation?”
Dr Thompson suggested that weak oversight and corruption may have undermined the process, preventing the country from benefiting fully from the sale of public assets.
“Once you begin to interrogate that,” he said, “you realise that one, there’s a lot of corruption in it.”
He argued that privatisation, when poorly managed, can strip the state of productive assets without strengthening the economy or institutions meant to support growth.
Dr Thompson linked the failure of privatisation to a broader problem of weak structural reform, noting that selling assets alone does not automatically lead to development.
For him, privatisation should have been tied to clear national objectives, institutional strengthening and long-term planning, rather than treated as an end in itself.
“Structural and institutional issues” remain unresolved, he said, and until they are addressed, policy changes will continue to fall short.
As Ghana undergoes another round of economic reforms under an IMF-supported programme, Dr Thompson warned against repeating past mistakes.
He said stabilisation measures and asset sales must be aligned with a coherent development strategy anchored in strong institutions.
“Until we deal with these structural issues,” he cautioned, “not much is going to happen.”
