The Ranking Member on Parliament's Roads and Transport Committee says there is no need for government to inject additional investment into bettering the Kotoka International Airport.
Kwame Agbodza comments come as the Aviation Minister Joseph Kofi Adda quashed rumours on the Super Morning Show on Monday, that government has received a proposal from, Turkish company - TAV-SUMMA - to privatise the Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL).
He insists that a privatisation deal is in the works and that the Aviation Minister should own up and be transparent about the government's intentions.
“I was hoping that the Minister would be bold enough to tell us that the government is trying to do this but he is hiding away, he is pretending that nothing is before them,” he said on the Super Morning Show on Monday.
The MP for Adaklu explained that while the KIA has been undergoing continuous significant transformation, the Covid-19 era is not the time to be borrowing more to invest in the airport.
According to him, the basis of the loan, which injected about $250 million into the expansion of Terminal 3 because “we believed that when we expand the airport to about a 5 million passenger capacity per year we will be able to pay off this loan after a period of time.”
Currently, however, the capacity of the airport he says stands at about 2.1 million and due to the coronavirus pandemic, a global movement has come to a standstill and the 5 million passengers per year target he explained, would only be achievable in the next five to seven years.
He, therefore, questioned why government would insist on borrowing more money to expand another terminal when this loan has not been paid off and stressed that the Ghana Airports Company Limited is not in distress to warrant external investments.
“What we need now is a very prudent way of managing ourselves out of the Covid,” he said.
Alternatively, he appealed to government to find funds to pay off existing loans from the Ghana Infrastructure Fund which still has money in it.
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