On Monday, February 19, 2018 when this column will be published, the Petroleum Commission (PC), regulator of the upstream industry and Ghana's lucrative petroleum resources will host a meeting in Accra themed 'Local Content Procurement Conference.' There are more than 500 companies including joint ventures registered with the PC, along...
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is fluent in 2 European languages; English and French.  A useful skill, given that Ghana is surrounded by Francophone countries on 3 sides (La Cote d'Ivoire, Togo and Burkina Faso) and faced on its coastline, by the unforgiving Atlantic sea. We are also a nation,...
When the Auditor General's (AG) statutory report on the spend by Ministries, Municipalities and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in 2016 is officially presented to Ghana's Parliament in February, 2018, it will come with the usual litany of unapproved payments, contracts backdated to cover work shoddily done, late and overpriced, good...
On the back of the successful ruling in September 2017 at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Seas to define Ghana's maritime boundaries with the Ivory Coast, more news. Subject to Parliamentary approval, this is virtually assured (the government has a majority in the House, the Legislature generally...
When Parliament resumes sitting in Ghana's teeming capital on Tuesday January 23rd, 2018, the 275 legislators, drawn from 10 regions - particularly because we are a deeply partisan nation, in the eye, again of an economic windfall - will address a number of issues that citizens and investors, domestic...
Headline news.  Ghana's big push to attract investment from Asia - Japan, Singapore and China - is well underway. At a breakfast meeting held in Accra on Friday, December 15th, 2017, the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, announced that "we are today examining the possibilities of arranging for a total...
At a breakfast table in the noisy restaurant of a hotel in Shenzhen, I met Kwame Song Dongshong, now President of the Powerchina International Group Limited. The company that built the iconic Three Gorges in China, is a behemoth by its own description in 'planning, survey, design, engineering, through...
If you must go to China, for the first time, as I did, then joining the First Lady, Mrs. Rebecca Akufo-Addo, on her first trip to the country, accompanied by the first virtually all female business delegation, from micro to medium to multinational companies - representing swathes of the...
When Pablo Escobar held sway in Colombia as the eminence grise of the cocaine trade, he would apparently offer anyone who stood in his way.  'Silver or lead - take a bribe or take a bullet'.  A compelling business proposition, to anyone, then or now, presented with these hypnotic...
The Doing Business (DB) survey is an annual report issued by the World Bank Group (WBG).  It ranks economies across the world on the time, ease and procedures required for a small to middle size domestic business, in the most populous city, to complete critical transactions. The first DB survey...