Kofi Nti
Kofi Nti, Commissioner General of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), has explained that government’s overall vision for the introduction of the paperless system at the country’s ports is aimed at reducing the processing time to the barest minimum.
According to him, the World Customs Organisation (WCO) has been mounting pressure on Ghana over the years to introduce the paperless system to lessen the plight of importers and exporters.
“Government’s overall objective is to drastically cut down on the delay processes at the ports. We want to do it in a day. And this is not strange. If in Dubai, it takes just a few minutes, about 5 minutes, to process goods for clearance, why can’t we do it in Ghana?”
Mr Nti disclosed this Monday at a media briefing aimed at informing journalists in Accra about the intended paperless migration programme.
Revenue protection
According to him, if the system becomes operational by September 1, this year, as planned, it will help to boost government revenue, grow it and remove human bottlenecks often encountered during goods clearance processing periods.
Stakeholder education
Commenting on stakeholder as well as public education on the new process, Mr Nti said all stakeholders, particularly those who are involved in the freight-forwarding processing, clearing agents and the rest, have been involved from day one.
“The issue now is the message has not sunk down. And so we are rolling out a programme to make sure that we intensify the education for the larger Ghanaian society.”
It would be recalled that a group calling itself Freight Forwarders of Tema Port threatened a sit-down strike should the call for the postponement of the implementation of the paperless regime not be heeded.
According to them, they deserve the right to be duly educated on the paperless regime before its implementation on 1st September.
“We have marshaled our resources to ensure that within this week, all these issues would be resolved. There was a technical problem. We have dealt with aspects of it and we hope that by the end of the week, everything would be solved.”
Public education
George Ofori, president of the Ghana Union Traders Association, also remarked: “We also believe that when the system comes onboard, the human intervention, human contacts that we always have with officials at the ports, is going to reduce drastically so that at least, sometimes certain things go on there which people complain about. We should also take note that it is not going to be 100 percent perfect from the inception. It will definitely face some challenges but I believe that the Commissioner-General should be able to address such challenges until we have a perfect system.”
Competition
“This system is long overdue. We should have had this a long time ago. Our ports should be favourable for foreign direct investment (FDI) because we are bounded by La Cote d’Ivoire and Togo which are perfect in terms of goods clearance. So the world is not waiting for us. ECOWAS won’t wait for us and Africa won’t wait for us. Once we have accepted to work to make Ghana the gateway to Africa, we must be able to sit up and make sure that we grab this opportunity now.”
Like all other systems, he said GUTA had embraced it “because we think it is going to reduce the cost of doing business in the country.”
By Samuel Boadi