Sometime in August President Kuffour inaugurated an advisory group for the formation of the Communications Infrastructure Company. The company will inherit the communications infrastructure of VRA, GNPC, GBC, Civil Aviation, and Ghana Telecom, which are in the process of being taken away from the parent companies and to form the beginnings of a national communications infrastructure network. The network will be expanded to provide the country with a modern national communications, infrastructure that will support all communications types, and will be used to serve all communications service providers equally and fairly.

There is an urgent need for modern communications infrastructure in Ghana. However, communications experts and industry players are extremely nervous and worried about the approach the Kuffour government is adopting to resolve this bottleneck to national development and economic growth.

The experts, governments advisory committee on the project, are unanimous in their opinion that this approach shows a serious lack of understanding of the nature of telecommunications, its business economics, and the role of effective regulation. To them, the approach shows a complete lack of appreciation of current trends and models of building a modern communications infrastructure in a reformed and liberalized communications market.

Communications infrastructure is equivalent to the major highways that link and facilitate economic and social interaction, business and residents in different cities.

In planning for it, there is the need to determine what the country’s needs may he within the next twenty to twenty five years and develop a clear program for achieving it. In the opinion of the experts, a communications backbone based on a fiber optic network is the only appropriate and adequate network to meet this criteria taking into consideration current data and future needs. In fact all the telephone companies are facing serious backbone capacity limitations and Ghana Telecom has already drawn up plans to install fibre optics on its major traffic route to deal with their capacity problems. The problem remains the ability to raise sufficient capital to meet their network expansion obligations and build a backbone in addition. Why then does the Kuffour government see the need to include Ghana Telecom’s old and already overstretched network in what the country needs to support modern services?

The governments plan does not indicate, among others, where the technical and commercial expertise that will be needed to build and manage the network, or where the funding will come from. The Minister of Communications has indicated on a number of occasions that the ministry does not have the requisite expertise to deal with communication issues and develop appropriate policies and strategies. This coupled with the recent experience of using foreign expertise to develop or manage Ghana Telecom makes one wonder about the risk Ghana communications services is being led to take. Some members of the technical advisory team have privately indicated that they have adequately expressed their fears but bureaucrats in the Ministry will not listen, and continue to insist that the plan has already received cabinet approval thus all that the team is required to do is to help implement the plan.

“The governments plan is like building modern asphalt roads to link up highways that cannot even meet the needs of todays traffic” the experts say. Ghana Telecom has hardly a backbone capable of meeting its own current voice telephony needs. Its backbone is made up mainly of old analogue microwave links that cannot support the full range of modern communications services.

The governments plan risk putting Ghana Telecoms services in jeopardy. Taking away Ghana Telecom’s inter-city network and giving it to the new company implies that Ghana Telecom will need to need to find money to lease capacity on the network to allow residents and businesses in one city to call those in another town or city. In addition the plan will put Ghana Telecom at a disadvantage to the other telephone operators who will still have their own inter-city networks. It appears the plan is engineered to make Ghana Telecom fall apart to provide the excuse for full privatization.

The question being asked is what business Government has, and the motivation for creating companies at a time when privatization is the policy?

In the information age, a modern national communications infrastructure network is vital to economic growth and national development. The availability of the Internet and the revolution in information and communications technology has been used to jump start the economies of countries such as India , Malaysia etc. Ghana can do the same only if it has a well thought out plan to build its communications infrastructure.