Public Enterprises Minister Joseph Cudjoe has identified the core issue behind the Tema Oil Refinery’s (TOR) difficulty in attracting and sustaining serious investment.
According to him, TOR has been reduced to a “political football,” a situation that has made it too volatile for any serious investor to consider sinking capital into.
“Anytime you have spoken to someone out there to bring investment to TOR, and I’m talking about serious investors in the refinery business, the response I have received is, TOR is a political football in Ghana. Therefore, which serious investor will come and expose his good money, corporate image, and personal reputation to a political football,” he stated.
Speaking during his turn at the Ministry of Information’s Meet-The-Press series IN Accra, Joseph Cudjoe, a former Deputy Minister of Energy in charge of Finance and Infrastructure, revealed that his discussions about private investments to partner with the government to recapitalize TOR often hit a roadblock due to concerns over political interference.
This, he said, serves as a major deterrent to potential investors who fear they “will be politically witch-hunted” or subjected to “unnecessary and uninformed public commentary,” ultimately risking their ability to conduct business elsewhere.
“Private investors usually don’t want to be known. They want their names out of the public domain. But in Ghana, get close to a public asset and see what will happen to you. People have money to invest, but they don’t want their names to be dragged in public as if they are thieves,” he stressed.
The minister criticized the prevailing environment where investors are often branded as thieves when they show interest in revitalizing non-performing public assets.
“We have a certain cultural environment in Ghana where when you have money and are getting close to a public asset to invest in, we start branding you a thief. So, it makes it difficult to attract serious private investment, good money into public assets. Because people don’t want their reputation to be soiled in Ghana when they have to go and invest in other countries like Norway, UAE when he comes here to invest his money in TOR, and it is as if he is stealing Ghana’s money, that’s the conversation among investors out there,” he indicated.
Joseph Cudjoe noted that due to this perception, serious investors would rather avoid Ghana or some would rather often choose to start their own new projects rather than risk their reputation by investing in existing public assets.
“So don’t be surprised that directly opposite TOR and in the same industrial enclave, there is a certain Sentuo, that will rather come out and build another refinery but then we could have offered TOR to the same investor to put money in it. Don’t be surprised that the proposed Petroleum Hub development project will attract another serious refinery, and our TOR will be there because we’ve made TOR a political football,” the minister stated.
However, he remains hopeful that “the President has put together a team to look into TOR and get a turnaround” to finally resolve the long-standing challenges of this strategic state asset.
MA/AE
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