The McDan Aviation Crisis and Ghana's Dangerous Habit of Building Up Champions Only to Tear Them Down

Every few years, Ghana finds a new target to dismantle. The 2019 banking crisis wiped out homegrown financial institutions in ways that still reverberate today. Now, observers are watching the assault on McDan Aviation with a sense of grim familiarity -- and the question is whether the country has learned anything at all.

A Pattern We Should Know by Heart

In 2017 and 2019, the Bank of Ghana revoked the licences of several indigenous banks -- UT Bank, Capital Bank, Unibank, Beige Bank, and others -- under the banner of financial sector cleanup. The official narrative was about protecting depositors and stabilising the system. What followed, however, was the swift transfer of market share to foreign-owned banks, the loss of thousands of jobs, and the near-total erasure of Black Ghanaian ownership from the upper tier of the banking sector.

Critics at the time warned that the methodology was flawed -- that viable institutions were being liquidated rather than rehabilitated, that the timeline was punitive rather than corrective, and that the beneficiaries of the cleanup were not ordinary Ghanaians but multinational financial groups with the capital to absorb the fallout. Those critics were largely dismissed. Years later, data from the Ghana Association of Bankers shows that foreign-owned banks now dominate the top five by assets in ways that would have been unthinkable in 2010.

The pattern was not new then. It is not new now.

What Is Happening at McDan Aviation

McDan Aviation, built by Ghanaian entrepreneur Dr. Emmanuel Armah Blay Engmann -- better known as McDan -- has become one of the most visible indigenous success stories in Ghana's aviation sector. The company operates the Terminal 3 concession at Kotoka International Airport and has expanded its footprint across ground handling, cargo, and private aviation services. McDan's rise represented exactly the kind of homegrown capital formation that economists and development advocates have long called for.

Now, that project appears to be under serious political and regulatory pressure. Reports of a government-directed review of the Terminal 3 concession, questions about the terms of the original agreement, and commentary from officials suggesting the arrangement may be renegotiated or terminated have triggered alarm among business observers. The specifics of the legal and contractual disputes are complex. But the broader dynamic -- a Ghanaian entrepreneur who built something significant now facing state-directed pressure -- is disturbingly familiar.

The Self-Destruction Thesis

There is a school of thought in Ghanaian political economy that describes a recurring phenomenon: the country produces entrepreneurs, institutions, and public figures who reach a certain height -- and then the system turns on them. The destruction can come from regulators, from political rivals, from competitors who use the state as a weapon, or from public opinion that has been deliberately inflamed. The result is the same: the person or institution is brought down, their assets redistributed, and the lesson absorbed by every subsequent entrepreneur who was watching.

That lesson is corrosive. It tells ambitious Ghanaians that building something significant makes you a target. It tells investors -- domestic and foreign -- that the rules can change when a powerful player decides they should. It tells young professionals considering whether to build locally or emigrate that the safer bet is to leave.

Ghana's entrepreneurship rate is high by regional standards. The country produces innovators, builders, and risk-takers with impressive regularity. What it struggles to do is protect and compound those gains across generations and across political cycles. Every time a significant indigenous business is dismantled -- fairly or unfairly -- some of that productive energy dissipates, and the next generation of builders recalibrates its ambitions downward.

The Due Process Question

To be clear: no individual or company is above accountability. If there are genuine issues with the McDan Aviation concession -- if the original agreement was procured improperly, if performance benchmarks have not been met, if public interest is being harmed -- then those concerns deserve rigorous, transparent examination. Ghana's legal and regulatory institutions exist precisely for this purpose.

The problem arises when those institutions are mobilised selectively, when timelines are compressed to prevent proper defence, when media narratives are cultivated to pre-empt legal proceedings, and when the endpoint appears to be transfer of assets rather than correction of behaviour. That is not accountability. That is confiscation dressed in legal language.

The 2019 banking crisis offers a cautionary reference point. Several of the affected bank owners have since pursued legal challenges arguing that due process was violated, that valuations were manipulated, and that the resolution framework was designed to favour specific outcomes. Some of those cases are still working through the courts seven years later. The cost -- in legal fees, in delayed justice, in reputational damage -- has been enormous. And the banking sector that emerged from the cleanup is, by most measures, more concentrated and less Ghanaian than it was before.

What Champions Actually Require

Building indigenous champions -- whether in banking, aviation, manufacturing, or technology -- is not simply a matter of cheering them on. It requires a legal environment where contracts mean what they say and are enforced consistently. It requires regulatory frameworks that prioritise correction over elimination when violations occur. It requires political culture that separates legitimate accountability from competitive destruction. And it requires a media and public discourse ecosystem that can distinguish between the two.

Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia -- countries that successfully industrialised and built globally competitive indigenous companies -- all went through phases where the state actively protected national champions from predatory competition while simultaneously holding them to high standards. The key word is simultaneously. Protection without accountability breeds rent-seeking oligarchs. Accountability without protection breeds the destruction of exactly the businesses the country needs.

Ghana has oscillated between both failure modes. The challenge is to find the narrow path between them -- and to resist the political temptation to turn every prominent entrepreneur into either an untouchable benefactor or a convenient scapegoat.

The Stakes Are Higher Than One Company

The McDan Aviation situation will resolve itself one way or another. The more important question is what signal the resolution sends. If the outcome is a fair, transparent process that either validates the concession or corrects it through proper legal channels -- with the entrepreneur afforded full due process and the public kept informed -- then Ghana will have demonstrated institutional maturity.

If the outcome is another rushed dismantling, another asset transfer, another homegrown institution converted into a political casualty -- then the country will have repeated its mistake. And the next Ghanaian entrepreneur who gets close to building something significant will remember what happened, and will make a different calculation about whether it is worth building here at all.

That calculation -- aggregated across thousands of ambitious Ghanaians over years and decades -- is how countries either advance or stagnate. The stakes of the McDan situation, in that sense, extend far beyond one airport terminal.