Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has bemoaned the inefficiencies at the country’s ports and the tedious processes business owners go through to clear their goods.

Speaking at the National Policy Summit in Accra on Monday 15 May, he said government will host a port efficiency conference on Wednesday 17 May to learn best practices from countries in Africa and beyond to ease the stress of doing business in Ghana.

According to him, there is the need to reduce the level of human intervention as far as clearing of goods at the port is concerned.

“We are very cognisant of the fact that our ports are very bureaucratic and, quite frankly, inefficient. You would see that a lot of the cost of doing business as far as the private sector is concerned is at the level of the port. You bring in goods and to clear them is sort of a tedious process and we have been looking at what to do to deal with this. How can Ghana’s ports become first class in terms of clearance,” he quizzed.

To answer his own question, Dr Bawumia said: “On Wednesday, we are calling the port efficiency conference and we are bringing in experts from within Africa and outside Africa. We have invited Dubai port, we have invited Singapore, Antwerp, and we want to see what some of the best in the world are doing that we are not doing.

“How can we get a lot more automation and less human intervention as far as the port system in Ghana is concerned? So we are going to see on Wednesday some major eye openers as to what is happening elsewhere vis-à-vis what is happening in Ghana and hopefully we would then be able to take some radical decisions to change our system in Ghana to make it a bit more efficient.”