The Managing Director of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Edmond Kombat, has made a pointed assertion about the facility’s troubled past, saying the refinery was deliberately allowed to deteriorate over time with the intention of selling it cheaply to private interests, a move that was blocked by vigilant workers and trade unions.
Speaking during a working visit by Fellows of the Africa Extractives Media Fellowship (AEMF) to the refinery, Kombat said previous attempts to bring in private investors were less about strengthening the facility and more about the optics of a transaction that served narrow interests. “It was really not much about the substance, but it was more about the form. This place was deliberately run down to be sold cheaply,” he said. He credited the refinery’s workforce with reading the situation accurately. “The workers that are here are very intelligent. The unions are very committed, and they read in between the lines,” he added, noting that the proposed price at which the asset could have changed hands was far below what a national infrastructure of its scale should command.
Kombat disclosed a detail that goes to the heart of why any future private participation conversation would be premature: TOR has not been formally valued since the year 2000. That means Ghana has operated for more than two decades without an authoritative assessment of what the refinery is actually worth. He said this gap makes negotiating any partnership or investment deal fundamentally disadvantageous for the state from the outset. “You don’t even know the assets that you are sitting on, and you are going into a public-private partnership. You are going to be cheated from day one,” he said.
To address this, management has commissioned a South African firm to conduct a fresh valuation of the refinery, an exercise Kombat described as a necessary prerequisite before any future investment discussions can take place on equitable terms.
On the question of privatisation or divestiture, Kombat was unambiguous. The government of President John Mahama is not currently pursuing a sale or private sector takeover of TOR. The immediate agenda is operational revival, not ownership restructuring. The refinery is operational and confidence is returning, but it is not yet fully restored, with the transformation described by those who have toured it as visible but incomplete.
TOR’s existing 45,000-barrels-per-day refinery resumed operations in December after nearly five years offline, currently running at 28,000 barrels per day, while a new direct-fired crude heater nears completion as part of a capacity rehabilitation project contracted to Italy’s Vergaengineering, which is reported to be 95 percent complete.
Under Kombat’s leadership, TOR has also secured the second-highest ranking among all public institutions in Ghana’s inaugural Public Financial Management (PFM) Compliance League Table, a recognition that reflects a broader institutional turnaround after years of dormancy and accumulated debts exceeding 517 million United States dollars.
For Kombat, a functioning and properly valued TOR is not merely an industrial objective. It is a strategic pillar of energy security, economic stability, and national sovereignty over a critical asset that belongs, as he put it, to every Ghanaian.
