D.K Wisdom

Sunday Morning Musings: Ghana and Industrialization In 1965, manufacturing was 9.8% of Ghana's economy. In 2025, it was 10.1%. Sixty years and many attempts to industrialise, and we are where we started. Every government had a plan. Nkrumah built state factories. Kufuor had his special initiatives. Mahama rebuilt Komenda. Akufo-Addo promised a factory in every district. Now we have the 24-Hour Economy and looking forward to the “New Economy”. The problem starts long before the ribbon is cut. Some projects never made business sense. Ayensu Starch was built to make 22,000 tonnes a year but sold about 2,000 tonnes to Europe in seven years. A 2005 estimate found that paying market prices for cassava would make its starch cost more than it sold for. A 1D1F rice factory was put in a district that mostly grows cocoa. Komenda cost $35 million, opened in May 2016 and shut within weeks, mostly for lack of sugarcane. Nobody had made sure there would be enough cane to feed it. By the government's own count in 2022, 106 One District One Factory projects were working. Even that number flattered the programme. A 2023 investigation by The Fourth Estate found factories that had been commissioned but never run, and others employing far fewer people than the government claimed. These are the problems a proper feasibility study is meant to catch before any money is spent. Too often, there was no serious study, or nobody acted on it. The same mistakes keep repeating. Factories are placed for political reasons. They are built before raw materials and buyers are secured. They are opened to meet election dates. Later governments try to revive them, and mostly fail. The New Economy promises $10 billion, some of which would go towards industrialization. The test is not what it builds. It is whether every project has to prove it makes sense before the money goes out, and whether anyone honestly reports what happens after. Have we learned enough lessons from the 60 years of trying to make it work this time?