James Topp Yankah (left), Founder and Managing Director of Brempton Portfolio Gruop Limited at Nsawam Prison, showing Dr Mahamudu Bawumia the products
Government has issued a new
directive for all state-owned institutions to purchase toilet rolls from local
manufacturing companies.
The directive takes effect from
the beginning of the next procurement cycle.
Vice-President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia
issued the directive when he visited a toilet roll manufacturing company—Brompton
Portfolio—at the Nsawam
Prisons in the Eastern Region on Thursday.
The company, which is located
in the prison yard with inmates as workers, is part of five new toilet roll
manufacturing companies established under
government’s ‘One District, One Factory’ (1D1F) initiative.
It, therefore, brings to 14 the
number of toilet roll manufacturing companies in the country, with nine already
in existence before the New Patriotic Party (NPP) came to power, thereby increasing
the production capacity of Ghana to about 50%.
The Vice-President said, “This
is very significant, and this is the reason why we have to support the local
industry.”
Reason
“What we are now satisfied with
is that Ghana now, in fact, has sufficient capacity to meet a large amount of
its demand for products like toilet rolls,” he indicated. Continuing, he said,
“So we are saying that from the next procurement cycle, all government
institutions, whether it is the military, the police, hospitals or schools … if
you are going to buy toilet rolls, all must be bought from local manufacturing
companies.”
The Vice-President stated that
he was confident the decision would engender job creation and foreign exchange
to grow the economy.
“The import bill for toilet
roll last year alone was $70 million … and we are importing from countries such
as Vietnam, Honduras, Panama, Bahamas, Marshall Islands and all over,” he
added.
Commitment
The Founder and Managing
Director of Brompton Portfolio, James Topp Yankah, vouched for the quality of
their products, saying “we are ensuring that 30% of all our profits go towards
the rehabilitation of the Ghana Prisons Service, because as we know there are prisons
reforms that are needed and these require money.”
“What they need to realise is
that we are a company that believes in socio-economic projects; once we get the
necessary support, we are also going to support a lot of social courses in
Ghana and that’s the objective of this project,” he added.
Dr. Bawumia was accompanied by the Deputy Minister for the Interior, Henry Quartey, and his colleague Deputy Minister for Trade and Industry, Robert Ahomka-Lindsay.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent
