Re: "Ghana International Airlines in Trouble?"

I refer to the article entitled : “Ghana International Airlines in Trouble?” that was posted on Friday 15th May 15, 2009, in the www.ghanaweb.com general news web-page, by a Nana Sifa Twum. Hmmm, Ghana – will this country ever change for the better, one wonders? It appears that clever women with pretty faces (a la Ms. Cotton!), who are politically well-connected, will continue to twist our big men (most of whose brains appear to go to sleep whenever they see a pretty face up-close) round their dainty little fingers, till the very end of time.

Why has this ignoramus of an airline executive, who has never managed an airline in her life before, and is clearly out of her depth, not been dismissed yet – by the regime that tells us it has come to create a better Ghana for us all? Ghana International Airlines should simply be closed down - and a new airline, Virgin ECOWAS started, to replace it.

That can be done by collaborating with Virgin Nigeria to create a West African equivalent of Air France-KLM. That is what should have been done by the geniuses in the previous regime. However, because Sir Richard Branson famously never pays bribes, they did not go down that route – because prospects for kickbacks were practically non-existent down that “corporate-road-of-transparency.”

A Virgin ECOWAS can gradually be expanded organically to include all the largely non-profitable national carriers from the member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – and help develop the sub-region as a multi-nation eco-tourism destination. An additional benefit would be that Virgin ECOWAS could treat the sub-region as a domestic market – and make internal flights in the skies across an area of a continent notorious for its unsafe domestic carriers, as safe as flights across the skies of the European Union (EU).

No serious government anywhere in the world that cares about how it spends taxpayers’ money will keep this claptrap of an airline flying. The Mills administration must simply let Ghana International Airlines die by starving it of funds. Funding what is the airline equivalent of a Dodo is akin to pouring money down a financial black-hole. In view of the chicanery involved in its setting up, and the "Bush-telegraph" stories that the wet-leasing contract was in effect a cloak of respectability for an offshore money-laundering special purpose vehicle, it just does not deserve to survive! A word to the wise…