Long delays at checkpoints, trade barriers affect trade facilitation
Delays at checkpoints affect trade facilitation
Ghana gained US$34 million through transit trade in 2015, GSA
Police want personnel to spend less time at checkpoints
The Upper West Regional Police Commander, ACP Peter Ndekugri, has charged his men not to interrogate transit truck drivers for more than two minutes as a means to facilitate trade along the nation’s corridor.
“No one should delay a transit truck for more than two minutes. Also, desist from acts that amount to harassment of the drivers,” ACP Ndekugri said this at a sensitization seminar for police personnel in the region on transit trade organized by the Ghana Shippers’ Authority (GSA) in Wa.
He said the move is part of measures not only to make the country increase its transit trade activities but also help Ghana conform to international protocols it has signed onto.
The GSA has cited many police barriers and checkpoints along the trade corridors, which cause unnecessary delays and its attendant harassment of transit truck drivers as impediments to transit trade.
According to the Authority, the Tema-Hamile corridor alone has 64 checkpoints while the Tema-Paga corridor has 68 checkpoints.
The Chief Executive Officer of the GSA, Ms. Benonito Bismarck in a speech read on her behalf, noted that a study conducted by the GSA in 2015 showed that Ghana made gains of about US$34 million through transit trade.
She said the international community had enacted trade legislation and protocols as part of efforts to facilitate international trade between landlocked countries through the sea coast.
She identified some of the legislations to include the International Convention on Multimodal Transport of Goods (1982) and the WTO Trade Agreement (2013), among others.
Ms. Bismarck noted that despite the benefits of transit trade along Ghana corridors, there have been several road governance challenges between transit truck drives and key state actors such as the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD), Customs and the Ghana Highway Authority, among others.
A Principal Freight and Logistics Officer at the GSA, Abdul Haki Bashiru-Dine, noted that the sensitisation became necessary due to the crucial role police played in transit trade, including ensuring safety along the corridors.
He, however, noted that there were our corridors are competing with other in the sub-region and therefore there is the need to address some bottlenecks being faced: “Our corridors are in competition with Lome, Abidjan and Lagos and in some cases Senegal. The transit trucks prefer to use our corridors because they think our corridors are safe, secured and our Ghanaian attitude is general good to them.
“Any delay makes our corridors uncompetitive. So, we are calling on the police to see how they can expedite action so that the trucks will move smoothly”, he explained.
Superintendent Samuel Sasu-Mensah, the Director of MTTD at the Police Headquarters, urged the police officers, who manned the checkpoints and barriers along the corridors, to ensure professionalism in their dealings with transit truck drivers while ensuring the needed safety on the road.
The sensitization by the GSA was premised on the financial advantages of transit corridors to Ghana as well as the need for landlocked countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to have access to the sea coast to engage in international trade.