Alex Mould writes
So,it appears the main burdens for many- industry and traders – are the following: Interest rates; depreciation of the Cedi; and inflation (which affect demand of most goods).
The cost of doing business is high – and most of this is deliberate and orchestrated by the organisations who sometimes deliberately make doing business cumbersome so that the people who work there – together with their middlemen interfacing with the clients – make money by “assisting” the self imposed cumbersome process.
Sometimes even the CEO/ head of institution will give you someone to assist you for which that person will charge the client for his/her services – Lands commission, Registrar General, DVLA, passport office, immigration, et al, to name a few.
To register a company should not cost more than GHC100, but, sometimes costs as much as GHS1,500.
Maybe this is where we need to focus becos all these really should be in the control of the economic management team, Ministry of Finance and Bank of Ghana.
We need to identify all the drains on government apart from the bloated employees (currently 890,000 from 640,000 in 2017, most of whom are not engaged at work and most redundant.
Some of these drains include:
1. Procurement abuse and state capture is a big one in Govt and in the parastatals especially
2. There are alot of hidden charges we charge the consumer for which I can not understand/fathom:
PURC, a regulator, has a levy for itself in the electricity price;
BOST, a commercial entity, has a levy/margin in the petrol price build up; and
We have indefinite debt recovery levies, of ring fenced debt, debt which keeps renewing itself. Etc
A look at the balance sheet if all the SoEs show that collectively they have more than doubled their liabilities (mainly institutional debt) where as some have like CocoBod and GNPC have entered an abyss of perhaps no return which will lead to, perhaps, a GOG bailout, who itself needs a bailout come August when the half year numbers come out
