Missive from parts of Africa

A light hearted and sometimes serious look at moving 6000km into a place in Africa: April 2007. Promoted back to South Africa, the missive will continue to track my foray's into deepest Africa as and when I get there.

Name:
Location: Joburg, Africa, South Africa

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

News and rip offs

I have not had the chance to run through the local newspapers due to being closeted at Bogoso. However, as mentioned in my last blog entry, I managed to buy a newspaper and spend 45 minutes in Tarkwa reading it. This if course was due to roadworks, as opposed to stopping off at the local coffee shop and enjoying an expresso or three.

One thing that did catch my eye was a “tender” published in the Graphic by our beleaguered Ghana Electricity Corporation.

It appears our friends have a tract of land in Accra. Some bright accountant type fellow decided to make really good use of this tract of land. Accordingly they invited bidders to do the following:

- Provide the finance, design, management and construction of an office block, shops and multistory car park for 450 cars.

- Once they have provided the finance, operate the buildings on a Build, Operate, Train and Transfer program – not exceeding 20 years.

- Finally for financing the deal, building the building, operating the building the lucky bidder will also be required to pay rent to the Ghana Electricity corporation.

- Oh yes… and then after the 20 years, give the building to GEC free of charge.


This AMAZING business opportunity caught my eye – as well as millions of others who are stampeding to take advantage of this.

WTF was the lad thinking. I am willing to invest $5 million, pay rent for something I have invested $5 million in, try and recoup it from people over the next 20 years and then walk away from my asset. I do not think so.

2 Comments:

Blogger Angie said...

sounds like one of those great scams you get by e-mail .... you know the type, I am the cousin of the Foreign Minister of ....... and please transfer ..... to our bank account and we will repay you ....... so that we can get my cousin into exile ..... etc etc .... a good business opportunity.... actually I think we even received one from the so call ex Foreign Minister of South Africa along with various people from Nigera etc etc.

7:01 AM  
Blogger Champagne Heathen said...

Sounds like something the development world thought up! Actually sounds just like a project an ex-boss of mine wanted us to become involved in!

11:13 AM  

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