Wings of memory, wings of ambition: the third rebirth of Ghana Airways

By Daniel Kojo HOLLIE

Twenty-two years after liquidation, Accra is courting strategic partners and inviting bids for a new flag carrier. Whether it flies, and stays in the sky, will turn less on aircraft type than on the governance architecture installed before the first ticket is sold.

On 28 April 2026, Ghana’s Ministry of Transport published a notice that, for the country’s aviation sector, was less a press release than a bell rung at a long funeral. The ministry formally invited expressions of interest from strategic and technical partners willing to take a majority stake, alongside the State, in a new national airline. Submissions close on 29 May. If the timetable holds, commercial operations are intended to begin in the first quarter of 2027, a little over two decades after the original Ghana Airways was liquidated in June 2005.

It is the third such attempt in a generation. The first ended in 2005 with debts of roughly US$160 million. The second, Ghana International Airlines, a public-private vehicle launched in 2005 to inherit the flag, ceased flying in 2010 and was wound up not long after. Both stories ended the same way: a national balance sheet impaired, a workforce dispersed, and a country of more than 30 million people once again reliant on foreign carriers to connect it to its diaspora and its trade partners.

The third attempt arrives in a different country and a different industry. Ghana sits at the centre of an African Continental Free Trade Area whose secretariat is in Accra. Accra International Airport, modernised and now anchored by Terminal 3, has reclaimed a meaningful share of West African transfer traffic. The Mahama administration has placed a national carrier among its industrial-policy priorities, and a 10-member task force chaired by the former managing director of Ghana Airports Company Limited, Charles Asare, has been working on the business model since May 2025.

And yet the question that should occupy ministers, lawmakers, and investors is not whether Ghana can launch an airline. The previous two relaunches proved that the country can purchase aircraft, secure landing rights, and sell tickets. The harder question, the one the third attempt must answer differently, is whether Ghana can govern an airline well enough to keep it flying once the launch ceremonies are over.

A flag, a debt, and a long silence

Ghana Airways was born with the republic. Founded in July 1958, sixteen months after independence, it was conceived as a joint venture in which the State held 60 per cent and the British Overseas Airways Corporation held the rest. It was, for a time, an instrument of Pan-African ambition: Vickers VC10s on the Accra–London run, DC-9s on the regional network, occasional service as far as New York and Tokyo, and an iconic livery that travelled with Kwame Nkrumah’s diplomatic corps. By the late 1960s, the State had bought out BOAC and the airline was wholly owned by Ghanaians.

What followed was a fifty-year case study in how political ownership without commercial discipline corrodes a national asset. Successive administrations rotated the management; routes were chosen for symbolism rather than yield; workforce expansion outpaced revenue; and creditors went unpaid. By 2002, then-chairman Sir Sam Jonah was telling the public that the airline owed roughly US$160 million and would not survive without a foreign partner. That same year, a DC-10 was impounded at London Heathrow on the order of a British creditor, and a planeload of Ghanaian passengers reportedly flew out of Banjul with seats that had been sold to Gambians, prompting threats to torch the airline’s offices.

A succession of partner deals, with Nationwide of South Africa, with British Midland, with Ethiopian Airlines, were announced and then unwound. In July 2004, the United States Department of Transportation barred Ghana Airways from American skies, citing the operation of unsafe aircraft on an out-of-date licence. The board was dismissed, the State took direct control, and in June 2005 the airline was placed in liquidation. Final severance payments to former Ghanaian staff dragged on until at least 2008.

Ghana International Airlines, the privately led successor in which the State held a smaller stake, ran into the same headwinds: undercapitalisation, opaque procurement, allegations of political interference, and a fleet too small to absorb the fixed costs of long-haul flying. By 2010, regular passenger services had stopped; formal wind-up came in 2015. President John Dramani Mahama, who returned to office in January 2025, has called the original liquidation a grievous mistake observing that the airline carried roughly US$80 million of debt against assets worth several times that figure.

The harder question is not whether Ghana can launch an airline, but whether it can govern one well enough to keep it flying.

The 2027 model: private majority, state minority

The architecture being proposed for the third carrier breaks decisively with the past. Under the framework articulated by Transport Minister Joseph Bukari Nikpe and the task force, a strategic investor, selected through a structured three-round engagement process, will hold the majority stake in a joint venture with the Ghanaian State. The partner is expected to bring not only capital but operational management, route-planning expertise, and, crucially, a network into which the new carrier can plug.

Two candidate jurisdictions have surfaced publicly. In May 2025, Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa held discussions in Abu Dhabi that the government framed as the foundation of a possible UAE partnership; the appeal of Emirati involvement is obvious in a country that already hosts a large Ghanaian diaspora in the Gulf and daily Emirates services into AIA. In July 2025, President Mahama widened the search by inviting TAP Air Portugal, Lisbon’s flag carrier and a long-standing Accra operator, to consider a stake. Other African operators, notably Ethiopian Airlines, remain plausible technical partners even if they do not bid for equity.

The proposed business is ambitious. The new carrier is to operate long-haul services to Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia, run a regional network at competitive prices, and stand up a cargo division to serve the perishables, pharmaceuticals and e-commerce flows that already move through AIA. Initial aircraft deployments are targeted for the first quarter of 2027. The State has been candid that public finances cannot underwrite the venture alone, which is why the equity structure must attract private risk capital.

The case for the project, on paper, is strong. West African aviation is one of the fastest-growing markets on the continent, supported by AfCFTA implementation, the Single African Air Transport Market, and a middle class whose travel propensity rises with each percentage point of GDP per capita. Ghana’s geographic position, equidistant between Lagos, Abidjan, Dakar and the Atlantic, favours a hub-and-spoke proposition that no current Ghanaian operator is large enough to monetise. Africa World Airlines and PassionAir compete effectively on domestic and short regional routes; neither has the fleet or the balance sheet to challenge Ethiopian, Royal Air Maroc or Air Côte d’Ivoire on long-haul connectivity.

The governance test

If the commercial logic is real, so are the warnings. Across the continent, the carriers that have failed read like a charge sheet against a particular model of state ownership: South African Airways into business rescue and serial bailouts; Nigeria Airways liquidated in 2003; Cameroon Airlines, Air Afrique, Air Senegal International, Air Zimbabwe, all eventually grounded by some combination of political interference, balance-sheet opacity, and procurement mismanagement. Ghana’s own two failures sit in the same family of failures.

Against that ledger stands a single, instructive counter-example. Ethiopian Airlines, founded in 1945 and wholly owned by the Government of Ethiopia, has remained profitable across most of its history. It is now the largest aviation group in Africa by fleet, revenue and network. The Ethiopian success has been studied extensively, by SOAS, by the African Growing Enterprises File, and by industry observers. The findings are remarkably consistent. The Ethiopian state owns the airline but does not run it. Management is recruited on merit, almost always from within the company; chief executives have routinely served thirty or more years at the airline before reaching the corner office. Strategic plans, successive Visions, including the current Vision 2035, are set, published, and held to. Procurement is handled at arm’s length from political offices. Frugality is treated as a corporate virtue.

Ethiopia’s lesson is not that state ownership is incompatible with airline success. It is that ownership without governance is. The same point can be put in the negative: every African flag carrier that has died, including both Ghanaian predecessors, died of governance failure before it died of cash-flow failure. The DC-10 seizure at Heathrow, the chartered aircraft that flew the wrong passengers from Banjul, the five management changes in four years catalogued by Ghanaian commentators in 2004, these are not simply operational embarrassments. They are symptoms of a board that had lost control of its executive, of an executive that had lost control of its commercial discipline, and of a shareholder that had lost the patience or the political space to insist on either.

Every African flag carrier that has died, died of governance failure before it died of cash-flow failure.

Five governance pillars the third carrier must install

If the new airline is to avoid becoming the fourth chapter of a familiar book, five governance choices need to be made, and visibly so, before commercial operations begin. None is novel; all have been recommended by the OECD Guidelines on Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises, by the State Interests and Governance Authority Act, 2019 (Act 990), and by international aviation lenders. The challenge is not invention but implementation.

First, an arm’s-length ownership structure. The State’s minority equity should be held through a single, professional entity, most plausibly the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) and not directly by line ministries. SIGA, established under Act 990, exists precisely to exercise the State’s ownership rights in commercial enterprises in a manner separated from sectoral policymaking. Putting the State’s shares behind that wall would, at the very least, force a written contract between the political principal and the commercial agent, with reporting obligations that survive changes of administration.

Second, a board appointed for competence rather than patronage. The Companies Act, 2019 (Act 992) and the SIGA Code of Corporate Governance for SOEs both require fit-and-proper directors and independent non-executives; neither requirement was effectively enforced at Ghana Airways. The new carrier’s board should include directors with verifiable experience in aviation operations, aircraft finance, fuel hedging, safety regulation, and cabin crew industrial relations. Board composition should be public; tenure should be staggered; and remuneration should be set by an independent committee rather than by ministerial discretion.

Third, executive recruitment on merit and tenure. The Ethiopian model is built on long-serving professionals who rise inside the airline. The Ghanaian model has historically been built on appointments that arrive with a new minister and depart with the next one. The shareholders’ agreement with the strategic partner must specify open international recruitment for the chief executive, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and head of safety, with fixed multi-year terms that cannot be cut short except for cause. Performance should be measured against a published five-year plan modelled on Ethiopian Airlines’ Vision documents.

Fourth, transparent procurement and disclosure. The single most damaging legacy of the previous attempts is the suspicion, never fully dispelled, that aircraft leases, ground-handling contracts and route allocations were tools of patronage rather than commerce. The new carrier should publish, at minimum, annual audited accounts to International Financial Reporting Standards, a register of related-party transactions, and a procurement policy that subjects leases above a defined threshold to competitive tender. Where the State retains a strategic veto, for instance over the relinquishment of bilateral traffic rights, the use of that veto should be reasoned in writing and laid before Parliament.

Fifth, a credible exit and re-entry mechanism for the State. Public capital in airlines tends to ratchet only one way in. The shareholders’ agreement should specify the conditions under which the State may dilute or exit, and equally the conditions under which it may not be diluted below a defined floor. It should also pre-commit the route by which any future bailout would be authorized, which authority requests it, on what evidence, with what parliamentary approval. The single most reliable predictor of repeated bailouts is the absence of a written rule that would prevent them.

Beyond governance: the economic and geopolitical case

Governance is necessary but not sufficient. The third carrier will fly into a market that has changed materially since 2005. Fuel costs, leasing rates, pilot shortages and the cost of capital for African aviation are all higher than they were when Ghana Airways last flew. The competitive set is sharper: Ethiopian, Royal Air Maroc, Kenya Airways and Air Côte d’Ivoire have all expanded, and the Gulf carriers operate Africa as an integral part of their global networks rather than as an afterthought.

Three operational choices will determine whether the airline reaches the second year, let alone the second decade. The fleet should be narrow-bodied at the outset, leased rather than owned, and standardised on a single type to minimise training and spares costs. The route map should focus first on dense regional pairs, Accra to Lagos, Abidjan, Dakar, Freetown, Monrovia, Conakry, where the new carrier can win share against incumbents and build the brand. Long-haul flying should follow once unit economics on regional services have been demonstrated, and even then, through codeshares with the strategic partner rather than as a stand-alone undertaking. The cargo division, often dismissed as ancillary, may in fact prove the most rapidly profitable line of business given AIA’s position in West African logistics.

The geopolitical dimension is real. Whichever partner is chosen, Emirati, Portuguese, Ethiopian, or another, the choice will shape Ghana’s aviation alignment for a decade. A Gulf partnership would tilt the network east, open Asian markets and Hajj traffic but raising legitimate questions about feed concentration into a single global hub. A Portuguese partnership would lean on a long-standing Lisbon–Accra relationship and deeper European reach but offer thinner exposure to the highest-growth markets. An African partnership, likely with Ethiopian, would be the most strategically coherent for the AfCFTA story, but politically the most demanding to negotiate. The task force’s evaluation matrix should weight not only price and equity terms but the network logic that comes attached to each partner.

The choice ahead

The case for a Ghanaian flag carrier in 2027 is not nostalgia. A country that hosts the AfCFTA Secretariat, that exports gold, cocoa and increasingly horticultural and pharmaceutical goods by air, and that fields one of West Africa’s largest diasporas, has a defensible commercial interest in owning a piece of its own aviation connectivity. The case against, those two prior attempts failed, that the public purse is stretched, that the global airline industry is brutal, is also real, and is the case that the third attempt must answer.

The answer cannot be aircraft. It cannot be a route map. It cannot be a launch ceremony at AIA. The answer must be a governance settlement, written into the shareholders’ agreement and into Ghanaian company law, that makes it harder to mismanage this airline than to manage it well. That is what Ethiopian Airlines has had since the 1970s. It is what Ghana Airways and Ghana International Airlines never had. And it is what, between now and the close of bidding on 29 May 2026, the task force, the Ministry of Transport, and Parliament still have time to install.

If they do, the third carrier may yet earn a different ending. If they do not, the airline will fly, and Ghanaians, who have already paid for two of these stories, will be asked to pay for a third.

Daniel Kojo Hollie is a writer covering Ghanaian law, business, and economic policy. He contributes to the Business & Financial Times.

The writer welcomes correspondence at [email protected]

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