Referee Or Player? The State’s Role At Labadi Beach

At dawn on October 2, 2026, soldiers cleared the Labadi beach economy at the request of a hotel owned by the State’s pension fund. The Presidency says it was not a government operation. The Member of Parliament (MP), the chiefs and the operators say they were never told. So on whose authority, and under what law?

Security personnel arrived at the La Pleasure Beach at about 4am, soldiers of the 48 Engineer Regiment, supported by the Ghana Police Service, pulled down about 30 structures, some of them multi-storey, including Vienna City and the Polo Beach Club.

By mid-morning, one of Accra’s busiest beaches was rubble. The Ghana Tourism Federation counts 85 businesses affected and about 4,000 jobs at risk, most of them held by women.

Not flood control, by the government’s own account

Within hours, the Presidency distanced itself. Stan Dogbe, Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of Operations and head of the anti-flood task force, said the clearance was not a flood mitigation action. It was carried out under National Security supervision, he said, at the request of the Labadi Beach Hotel. He added that his comments did not refer to La Pleasure Beach. It was razed all the same.

That statement matters. A flood emergency is the kind of public-safety ground on which the State can argue it had to act fast. By ruling it out, the government’s own operations chief left one explanation standing: a commercial request from a hotel, carried out by the security services.

SSNIT’s board confirmed it had asked National Security to step in. Alongside security, sanitation and coastal damage, its stated reasons included the effect on hotel patronage, revenue and financial performance.

Follow the money

If the request was commercial, the commerce deserves a look. Labadi Beach Hotel sells rooms, 164 of them, but also runs five bars, two restaurants and a 900-seat conference and banqueting hall. Its financial statements, made public in 2024, showed turnover of GH¢120.4 million in 2022 and GH¢188.1 million in the 2023 management accounts. In June, SSNIT’s Director-General put last year’s profit before tax above GH¢67 million.

Operators put the Labadi beach market at roughly GH¢180 to 200 million a year. On those figures, the economy on the sand was about as large as the hotel behind it.

The two are not simple rivals. The beach sells no rooms, and its crowds bring visitors who need beds. They overlap on food, drink, events and nightlife, the spend that peaks in December, and on the beach experience itself. That is the ground SSNIT named in its reasons, and the ground its redevelopment would occupy: restaurants, beach lounges and live music on sand now under its control.

In October 2025, the Director-General said SSNIT would fully back the hotel’s expansion. Whether competition drove the decision, only SSNIT can say. Who stands to gain is less of a mystery.

The State loses too. Operators paid taxes to the Ghana Revenue Authority, whose officers, they say, come to the beach every December to collect; levies to the Ghana Tourism Authority; fees to LaDMA; and rent to the La Stool. On the operators’ figures, the 1% tourism levy alone is worth up to GH¢2 million a year, before VAT and income tax. All of it stops with the business.

Why two months before December?

December is when Accra’s hospitality calendar earns its year: the diaspora comes home, the beach fills, and the coastal hotels have their busiest weeks. Traders had already bought stock and equipment for it.

Clearing the beach on 2 October removed the businesses from their best eight weeks. Some operators say they had been told it would happen at the end of the year. SSNIT’s Director-General has since promised to clear the debris quickly so that some traders can return to a planned African market before Christmas.

Whatever the intention, the effect of the date is plain. The private beach economy enters its peak season without premises; the hotels behind it enter with the beachfront cleared.

Nobody with a stake was told

The MP for La Dadekotopon, Rita Naa Odoley Sowah, is also a Deputy Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs. She arrived that morning to confront the soldiers, saying the authorities had assured her the area would be spared. The hotel’s managing director told her he knew nothing of it; its board chairman told her it would go ahead because the land belonged to the hotel. Her constituency said neither the party nor the local government authorities had received notice, and that Pleasure Beach was not on the flood task force’s list.

The La Dadekotopon Municipal Assembly (LaDMA), which operators say issued their permits and collected their taxes could not be reached for comments, and the La Traditional Council, which collects rent from 85 vendors on the beach, learnt of the plan only informally, on 16 September. After a meeting with SSNIT, National Security and two ministers, the La Shikitele, Nii Adjei Koofeh IV, said both had apologised. The redevelopment is now on hold.

The operators describe weeks of verbal warnings, but no date and no written notice. Many watched the belongings they had packed destroyed with the buildings.

A beach the courts had already organised

This was not ungoverned sand. In 2002, the Ministry of Tourism and the La Traditional Council agreed to manage La Beach jointly and share its revenue. When that broke down, the courts stepped in. On 21 July 2022, the Court of Appeal directed a nine-member management committee: three each from the La Traditional Council, the La Dadekotopon Youth Association and the Ghana Tourism Development Company, a state company.

The State, therefore, already sat, by court order, on the body responsible for the beach. If the beach needed cleaning up, there was a lawful table to bring it to. Was that committee consulted? Was the Ghana Tourism Authority consulted? The public has not been told.

The hotel’s own record points the same way. In 2007 and 2008, the company behind Labadi Beach Hotel rented beachfront from the La Pleasure Beach Resort Management Committee, and in April 2022 it asked the La Traditional Council to renew its expired beachfront lease for 20 years. SSNIT now says the southern beach falls within land the State acquired in 1967; the Council disputes it. That is a question for a court.

What the law requires

Owning land, or believing you do, is not the same as the power to demolish what stands on it. As the lawyer Samson Lardy Anyenini has pointed out, the Land Act 2020 gives the State a route against unlawful occupation of public land, but only where its conditions are met and through an authority the law empowers. Municipal assemblies have their own powers under the Local Governance Act 2016. Neither makes a pension fund or a hotel the enforcing authority.

The courts have been consistent. In 2022, the High Court at Mankessim held that an assembly which demolished a building without written notice had committed trespass; “Stop Work, Produce Permit” painted on a wall does not count. In April 2026, the High Court held that a demolition by a public authority without statutory notice violated the owner’s constitutional right to property, and awarded damages.

Where the land is itself before a court, the position is plainer still. Mr Anyenini notes that a prior court order would then be unavoidable, citing the Polo Beach Club case, where an injunction application was pending. La Pleasure Beach’s management had said in September that its own ownership dispute was before the courts. Article 23 of the Constitution requires administrative bodies to act fairly and reasonably; soldiers on site are not a legal basis.

The lawful route was not obscure: go to court, or ask LaDMA or the Lands Commission to act under statute, with written notice, and seek an order where the land is contested.

Referee or player?

There is nothing wrong with a public fund owning hotels; pension funds worldwide own property and compete with private businesses every day. What keeps that fair is competitive neutrality: a state-owned business may compete, but gains no advantage from being state-owned.

Same courts, same permits, no soldiers.

At Labadi, the sequence speaks for itself. By SSNIT’s own account, the hotel struggled to expand because of encroachment, turned to SSNIT, and SSNIT turned to National Security. The cleared sand is now earmarked for much of the trade the demolished businesses did.

If a state enterprise can clear its competitors through the security services whenever its balance sheet requires it, the precedent will not stay on the beach. It will travel to fuel retail, banking and transport. The Constitution points the other way: Article 36(2)(b) commits the State to ample opportunity for private initiative and a pronounced role for the private sector.

The fair case for SSNIT

None of this makes SSNIT’s concerns imaginary. Sanitation, waste and security on the beach were long-standing complaints, and some structures were permanent buildings on what is meant to be a public beach. SSNIT’s money belongs to more than two million contributors, and a fund that lets its best assets decline fails them. The objection is not to the objective. It is to the method, and to who was allowed to use it.

Cheaper before the bulldozer

The repair is not complicated: separate the roles. Let LaDMA, the Ghana Tourism Authority and the EPA work with the La Stool and the court-appointed committee to clean up the beach through notice and due process. Tender the redevelopment openly, let SSNIT bid like anyone else, and give existing operators time, a place in the new scheme, or compensation.

The alternative is already arriving: a compensation committee, a community lawyer preparing suits, a tourism federation warning about investor confidence, and possible judgment debts that would fall on the very public and pension money SSNIT set out to protect. As Mr. Anyenini put it, “The rule of law is cheaper before the bulldozer than after it.”

Ghana needs its State to be the referee. At Labadi, so far, it has chosen to play.

By Jerry Adjei

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