Benjamin Nsiah, the Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Management and Sustainable Energy, is advocating for a complete overhaul of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR).
This recommendation follows recent calls from the General Transport Petroleum and Chemical Workers Union (GTPCWU) of the TUC for an investigation into the current TOR board. The GTPCWU has raised concerns about irregularities and a lack of transparency within the board, while also supporting the need for a thorough investigation.
Mr. Nsiah has stressed the importance of the government reassessing the refinery’s entire workforce, noting that the facility is significantly overstaffed, with roughly 800 employees.
“I believe that all workers and anyone at TOR should be sacked for now, so that we are sure that certain redundant conversations that we continue to do are not done to ensure that the company comes back to its feet. So it’s not about board, the whole institution called TOR needs an overhaul,”
Because if in other jurisdictions where a company continuously in the last 3 years record negative equity, what it means that the company would have been liquidated and liquidation means that anyone working for this particular company would have been at home now. But being a public company and also being a state-owned entity, I think that some of these concerns will be raised by investigating previous boards.
I think that not investigating only the previous boss, but anyone who works at TOR, needs to be sacked so that we put certain better structures in place to invite in the needed human resource we need, to man that particular organization.
If you look at TOR today, TOR is overstaffed. TOR, a company that needs about 150 employees, has over 800 employees to it’s employee list. And we continue to pay them even though this particular company is not working. “
