Running mate to the NDC flag-bearer and former Communications Minister, John Dramani Mahama, has challenged the government to avail itself for debate on the sale of Ghana Telecom (GT). This, he said, is to prove to the government that it was the brain behind the collapse of the company, which was performing well before Telenol took over. Speaking in an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Mahama argued that when he was Minister of Communications, government gave GT a five-year exclusivity from 1997 to 2002, by giving them a monopoly on public pay phone deployment. By doing this, they did not allow the other telecommunications companies to do same, so GT enjoyed a protected market from the other organisations. “It was a profitable concern making in excess of over ¢100 billion profit”, he stressed. He stated that when Telenol was mismanaging GT and people raised red flags, government ignored it until it became worse, adding that Telenol took short term loans with high interest rates to buy equipments from Alcatel, while cheaper tender financing was available from Ericson. The former Minister said he was not against the sale of the company, but the price being offered for it. Mr. Mahama mentioned that if government unbundled GT in terms of the One Touch mobile network, the GT broad band 4 U, SAT- 3 sub marine cable and the fixed network, and privatise them as separate entities, they would make much more money from such a process than this current one. “Even the Voltacom fibre network and the National Fibre Optic back bone are being thrown into the deal”. He noted that unlike the Telecom Malaysia agreement, there are no performance requirements and time lines to be met by Vodafone, adding that Areeba, which also operates on GSM just as GT, was sold in excess of $5 billion some few years ago. The Bole MP said the NPP’s position when they were in opposition was that receipts from divestiture of National assets should not be used to finance budget deficits, so it was strange that they have turned around today to practice what they preached against. He again challenged the government to come out with an honest statement on the state of the Ghanaian economy. According to him, Economists have predicted that the cedi, which is sliding rapidly against the dollar and currently being changed at the forex bureaus at $1 to GH¢1.25, could easily fall to $1 to GH¢ 1.5 by the close of the year without the anticipated 900 million GT sale. Mr. John Mahama explained that the absence of network expansion requirement and a clear cut definition of service in the Vodafone agreement meant that Vodafone is likely to concentrate most of its investment in the mobile telephony and data sector, at the expense of other critical telecom services. He reiterated that it is also not clear what angle or method of evaluation was used to arrive at the figure of 900million dollars. Source: Chronicle