Ziad Hamoui has praised Ghana’s port infrastructure The National President for Borderless Alliance, Ziad Hamoui, has described Ghana’s strides to improve its port infrastructure, in order to position the country as a hub for inter-regional trade as a positive trajectory.
He has however advised that digitization would have to be increased, and human interference lessened to the barest minimum, to enhance delivery of service to woo more transit business to Ghana’s corridor.
“We have been modernizing our major infrastructure in order to allow us accommodate a role as a conduit to West Africa but at the moment, we have to look at how to reduce the human factor to the minimum. That is the main point why the decision has been taken to go digital,” he said.
Speaking on Eye on Port’s live interactive program on Metro TV, Ziad Hamoui, said digitization is the best way of creating an efficient trading atmosphere, comparable to the likes of world class African transit countries like Morocco.
Checkpoints reintroduced?
Speaking on the same program, the Chief Revenue Officer in Charge of Transit Terminals and Preventive, Douglas Konadu Yiadom, revealed that Government has given the green light for the Customs Division of GRA to reintroduce intervening checkpoints to help trace the problem of diversion which has been a major concern associated with the transit business, and this initiative was supported by the Head of ISRT Unit of SIC.
“We want announce that the Government has given us the greenlight to activate some of the barriers that were removed,” the Customs officer revealed.
“These are not barriers. These are customs mandatory checkpoints that would have to do the update once a vehicle gets there for the collection of statistics. It will help us know where the goods got before they were diverted. So I support this customs decision to bring back the mandatory checkpoints,” the Head of ISRT Unit of SIC elaborated.
But Ziad Hamoui cautioned that this is not the friendliest means of trade facilitation, especially comparing it to other neighboring countries. Instead, he called for the improvement of risk management at source to eliminate the likelihood of cargo diversion.
“The Minister of National Security at a time in Togo took a decision to abolish the checkpoints. Since then the checkpoints are not there and their trade is flowing. Ghana is one of the more difficult countries to tackle because of the structure of the security agencies,” he expressed.
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