Private Legal Practitioner, Gabby Otchere-Darko says he is confident that ‘pieces’ of the Akufo-Addo led administration’s mantra of ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ is gradually falling into place due to some of the government’s key industrialization initiatives.

According to him, he expects by next year, the first refinery under the Ghana Integrated Aluminum Development Corporation, to be established, to commence aluminum production in a bid to get the full benefits of the mantra.

“We built the Akosombo Dam in the sixties, we built VALCO shortly afterwards, yet we have bauxite and a smelter but we didn’t have a refinery so we needed to rely on bauxite that had been refined from abroad being brought in to use as a smelter at a much reduced cost of energy so we didn’t get the full benefit from it.

“We have maybe almost 1 billion metric tonnes of bauxite in our country and if you mine them, that’s about US$40 per tonne, if you refine it that’s about US$400 per tonne, if it goes through the smelter to turn into aluminum that’s over US$2,000 dollar per tonne and if you go further to build alloy rods that is US$10,000 so the whole value chain is now going to soon see fruition,” he explained.

Gabby Otchere-Darko made this known on the sidelines of the Liberty Lecture Series organized by the Danquah Institute in Accra on the topic; ‘Industrializing Ghana Beyond Aid for an Integrated Africa’ on Wednesday, December 11.

He reiterated that government needs the commitment and conviction to see the full benefit of ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ adding that his overall assessment on the mantra is that, ‘it is working’.

“Tell me a time that since independence, within a space of three years, we have had over 100 factories being set up unless you want to talk about the time that the state invested its own tax payers resources in setting up factories,” he quizzed.