Against all odds! Why the ‘three darlings’ failed?

Although a plethora of research has examined the benefits of government support for stateowned enterprises, our understanding of how domestic support can become a source of liability is severely limited. In this paper, we develop a novel concept of “liability of domestic support” to articulate how government support for state-owned firms can create conditions for business failure to occur. Analyses of the cases of Air Afrique, Nigeria Airways and Ghana Airways led to the identification of factors which helped to create the conditions that allowed inefficiencies, mediocrity and incompetence inherent in state-owned organisations to thrive, which ultimately led to their demises.