The sad saga of Ghana's Valco

The sad saga of Ghana's Valco

Forty years ago, US aluminium companies not only dictated their own terms for the power required to drive their voracious smelters, but also the politics of entire South-based nations. (Some critics would claim they still do so today - if to a lesser extent).

The decision by Edgar Kaiser's eponymous aluminium company, along with Reynolds Aluminium, in 1960, to set up an aluminium enterprise in Ghana was based primarily on securing cheap electricity from the Volta River. Access to Ghana's rich bauxite deposits - though important - came second. The companies were assisted by the World Bank and the fact that Kwame Nkrumah's government had committed itself to debt repayments it could ill afford.

For twenty years the Volta partners got the cheapest electricity on the planet, while Ghana was forced to import oil at the expense of no less than half its vital foreign exchange.

In 1966 Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup: caught between negotiating for a better deal with Kaiser, while moving the country towards socialism and into the arms of Russian communism. The ousted president initially called Valco "the greatest of all our development projects". Yet, from the outset, the power to govern it - both literally and figuratively - had been surrendered

Now, with the company's operations crippled and the Ghanaian government shrinking from the prospect of taking them over. it seems likely Valco will simply be asset-stripped