Professor Ransford Gyampo has disclosed that his outfit directly petitioned the Bank of Ghana (BoG) after freight forwarders raised an alarm over the use of inflated exchange rates by some shipping lines—rates that he said undermine the government’s efforts to stabilise the cedi.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Shippers’ Authority expressed frustration over what he described as blatant disregard for national economic policy by certain foreign entities operating in the shipping sector.
“Even though the dollar was trading at around GHC 10, some shipping lines were charging at rates as high as GHC 17,” he said on Channel One TV monitored by MyNewsGh.
“That makes nonsense of the efforts of government to stabilize our currency.”
He noted that following his intervention and submission of a detailed report to the central bank, the BoG acted swiftly by convening a stakeholders’ meeting and subsequently issuing policy directives to rein in the practice.
Prof. Gyampo used the platform to call out what he sees as excessive leniency toward foreign companies in Ghana, urging a stronger posture in defending national sovereignty.
“We are so friendly we allow foreigners to destroy what we’ve created… that doesn’t happen elsewhere,” he charged. “You must do business with respect to our rules.”
In addition to foreign exchange irregularities, he pointed to persistent challenges faced by freight forwarders due to frequent breakdowns in the E-COM system at the ports.
“Sometimes it’s power outages or machine failures, and these result in unfair demurrage charges,” he explained. “We’ve intervened many times to prevent shippers from bearing costs they did not cause.”
