The Director-General of State Interest and Governance Authority (SIGA), Mr Edward Boateng, has indicated that the Finance Minister should not be the only one to take the blame for Ghana’s economic hardships.
In his view, heads of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) who are constantly running their respective institutions down should be blamed as well.
According to him, most of these heads of SOEs are managing the institutions like their little corner shops and have rendered the institutions financially unsustainable.
He noted that everybody is blaming the Minister because he is the disbursement officer, but if we are to be fair, heads of SOEs must equally share in the blame.
“You cannot manage SOEs as if they are your little corner shops. That’s what a lot of our Chief Executives have done in the past.
“I feel very sorry when I hear everybody talking about the Finance Minister and pushing him as if he spent the money on his family. It is because a lot of these entities in Ghana are not run properly.
“But seriously are we being fair, are we really being fair because people are running these organisations and running them down and they are going to him or they are going to the Ministry of Finance , now a lot of them come to SIGA; do this for us, do that for us. How are we going to make the money back, they have no idea. That is not sustainable”, Mr Boateng said.
He was speaking at the ‘State of Agency Report’, a weekly media briefing put together by the Ministry of Information to enable SOEs articulate their vision and mission statement, ongoing projects and achievements to the people of Ghana.
Speaking with a very passionate voice depicting how worried he is about the state of underdevelopment of most SOEs in the country, Mr Boateng said the difference between SOEs in Ghana and other developed countries such as Austria is organisational excellence, operational efficiency and the drive to be financially sustainable.
He noted that in Ghana, government uses huge chunks of money to set up all these state Institutions, but very few of them pay dividends, meanwhile these entities control 50% of the country’s resources.
He, however, said that all these trends will change in a few years to come and that SIGA is putting measures in place to ensure the change occurs.
He indicated that SIGA will reverse trends such as poor corporate governance and ensure transparency and accountability. It will also reverse the continuous underperformance of state entities, which leads to financial loss and ensure that SOEs pay dividends to the government.
To ensure that the organisations also lend their support to SIGA to achieve its aim, Mr Boateng indicated he will advise the government to close down any organisation that does not show any improvement in its operations.
He said all this is to ensure that SOEs are managed well because Ghana’s economy would not be where it is now if some of these SOEs were managed well.
“If we were achieving our results maybe our economy will not be in this situation, so it is one of the things that we are looking to achieve,” Boateng said.
