For Akwasi Addai Odike, the story of Ghanaian business today is one of slow suffocation — caught between political vendettas at home and an expanding foreign footprint that few seem willing to confront.
Speaking on Angel FM with host Saddick Adams, the businessman and political figure delivered a blunt diagnosis of what ails local enterprise: Ghanaian-owned businesses are not simply failing on their own merit. They are being pushed out — by Chinese investors consolidating control over key economic sectors, and by a domestic political culture that treats private enterprise as an extension of the party battlefield.
“It’s death by two cuts,” Odike’s argument essentially runs. On one front, foreign players — Chinese enterprises in particular — are steadily absorbing sectors that should be anchoring indigenous wealth. On the other, the very politicians who should be building a protective environment for local business are instead wielding economic policy as a weapon against their opponents.
His accusation cuts across the aisle. Both the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress, he argued, have been guilty of targeting businesses perceived to be sympathetic to the other side — starving them of contracts, creating regulatory obstacles, or simply looking the other way as they struggle. The effect, he said, is predictable: weakened local enterprises, a vacuum quickly filled by foreign capital, and an economy increasingly shaped by interests from outside its borders.
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The consequences extend well beyond any single business. When indigenous companies collapse or stagnate, the jobs disappear with them. Investment confidence erodes. And the broader project of building a self-sustaining Ghanaian economy — one less dependent on foreign capital and more rooted in local ownership — loses ground.
Odike’s intervention lands in the middle of a long-running and still unresolved national debate: how much space should foreign investors, particularly from China, occupy in Ghana’s economy? What obligations do political actors have to protect rather than exploit local business? And what structural reforms would it actually take to reverse a pattern that, by his account, both major parties have helped entrench?
Those questions, for now, remain louder than the answers.