The Ghana Union of Traders Association’s (GUTA) president attributes the slowdown in port activity on how expensive doing business is.
Subscribe to our newsletter!
According to Dr. Joseph Obeng, the cost of doing business is exceedingly high right now, which is discouraging for business owners because they are losing money instead of profiting when compared to their counterparts in neighboring nations.
As a result, he claimed, most companies now conduct business and purchase goods through the ports of nearby nations like Togo.
Our business is not something we conduct in a vacuum. With the neighboring nations, we are in rivalry. Together with the continental free trade zone. Due to the enormously, incredibly high cost of conducting business, we are absolutely irrelevant and irrelevant.
“We are losing money in all of our cross-border trading along the West Africa sub-region, too. Including Togo. This explains why occasionally you hear about so many people traveling to Togo to purchase stuff.
Dr. Obeng continued by saying that the drop in port traffic was also a factor in the inflation Ghana was currently experiencing.
He added that because inflation places an unnecessary cost on both the trade community and consumers, it prevents customers from making the same volume of purchases that they did before inflation.
He emphasized that this had an impact on the trader in that they struggled to repay their debts, which also had an impact on their business.
Turnover is vital to trading. And that if your turnover is reduced because the general public’s purchasing power has decreased due to the inflation we are experiencing, making it difficult for them to purchase the volumes they once did, it means that we [the traders] are unable to pay back our loans because your turnover is reduced,” he said.
In addition, he highlighted the negative effects of the disproportionate taxation levied on port services.
He claimed that some people would sneak their goods or avoid the main ports and route their commodities through other places in order to evade taxes.
