Private Legal Practitioner and Managing Solicitor of Paintsil, Paintsil & Company, Kweku Painstil, has called for reforms in the management of State-Owned Enterprises.

Speaking on JoyNews' Newsfile, on Saturday, he said the routine where boards for SOEs are dissolved alongside a government that loses power and new boards instituted by the new government, should stop.

He blamed the non-performance of the SOEs, largely on this practice.

“That new king new law [where] a new king comes in and every board and everybody must be changed should stop,” he stressed.

Mr. Paintsil explained that people who are appointed based on political affiliation come in, owing allegiance to whoever appointed them instead of pursuing the interest of the State-Owned Enterprise.

He, thus, called for laws that will ensure that people render proper account of their administration while managing public sector businesses “and possibly naming and shaming” those who fail to deliver as expected.

He was speaking in relation to the unprofitable performance of SOEs in a recently released SIGA report. The report indicates that in 2020, most SOEs made crippling losses running into billions of Ghana cedis.

The Lawyer stated that another factor that has contributed to these huge loses is lack of transparency in the operations of SOEs.

“Every government that comes determines who is going to be in there, but we can’t forget about corruption and the lack of political will to prosecute.

“In Ghana here, when you’re failing, they give you a reward- a very big reward and they ask you to resign and that appears to be the end.

“And if we really want to become serious these are some of the things that we need to revisit. We need to come to ourselves as a country and decide that we cannot have this thing year in year out and every day it’s a tale of woes of one sort or the other,” he stressed.

He added that to check these losses, the interest of  citizens in the affairs of the SOEs must be whipped up.

“Citizens must be citizens. People must be activated to take an interest in the State-Owned Enterprises. Transparency,” and “there must be structures responsible to be doing all these,” he added.