Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru & Mary Ankrah
FOREX bureau operators and other business people have urged the government to stop the operation of dollar accounts and the payment of services in dollars.
Those measures, they said, would enable the government to arrest the depreciation in the value of the cedi against foreign currencies, especially the dollar.
Forex bureau operators and business people in various parts of Accra were sharing their concerns over the continuous fall in the value of the cedi against the dollar in separate interviews with the Daily Graphic.
The cedi is reported to have lost 20 per cent of its value against the dollar in the last three months.
Since the value of the cedi started depreciating against the major foreign currencies, especially the dollar, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) has injected more than a billion dollars into the economy in an effort to stabilise the situation.
The forex bureau operators argued that the fact that people were allowed to operate dollar accounts meant that they could keep enough dollars in their accounts when dollars were most needed on the market.
Besides, people operating dollar accounts were able to transfer their dollars outside, which contributed to the flight of the currency.
A forex bureau operator at Nima, Mr Abu Samad, said the value of the cedi continued to fall against the dollar because there was shortage of dollars in the system.
That situation, he said, had been caused by people who operated dollar accounts and kept many dollars in those accounts.
He said because of the artificial shortage of dollars, the demand for the currency had gone up, thereby affecting the value of the cedi.
Mr Samad, therefore, appealed to the government to pump more dollars into the economy, since that was the only way to save the cedi from its continuous fall against the dollar.
An operating officer with Tigo, Mr Elvis Kyere, cited the charging of rent, school fees and other services in dollars as one of the factors which had compelled people to open dollar accounts.
He said the fall in the value of the cedi against the dollar affected businesses, hence the need for the government to take drastic action to reverse the trend.
Meanwhile, the Ghana Union of Traders Associations (GUTA) has called on the government to take immediate steps to arrest the alarming rate at which the Ghana cedi is depreciating against the major trading currencies.
It said the fall in the value of the cedi had made business planning extremely difficult, if not almost impossible.
Besides, GUTA said, the continuous depreciation of the cedi discouraged savings, which had affected government’s effort to mop up excess liquidity from the system.
The President of GUTA, Mr George Kwaku Ofori, made the call at a press conference on the depreciation of the local currency in Accra yesterday.
He attributed the fall in the value of the cedi to poor management, indicating that there was something basically wrong with the fiscal management of the economy.
“We in the trading sector of the economy have observed that whatever has gone into the thinking and approach in managing the current fiscal policy has been flawed,” he said.
The GUTA President said if the government did not find measures to address the situation, it would collapse business, erode working capital, some of which are loans contracted from banks at high interest rates and from other credit facilities.
He asked the government to monitor the free zone ports by instructing exporters to bring in a certain percentage of goods into the country.
He again requested the state to introduce a vigorous policy to control the amount of profit telecommunication companies repatriated outside the country.
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