The Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, has asked the Ghana Standards Authority to suspend the Ghana Conformity Assessment Programme (G-CAP) until broad consultations are done with all stakeholders.
He said though the G-CAP was to focus on the quality of products by checking the flow of shoddy goods into the country, there was the need to seek stakeholder opinion before implementation was done.
Dr Spio-Garbrah said this at a meeting with the executive of the Ghana Union Traders Association (GUTA) yesterday.
He said he believed the pre-Xmas brisk season of importing, distributing and retailing was the wrong time of the year to introduce a controversial new measure into the economy.
He indicated that a final decision would be announced very early in 2015 when adequate consultation and public education would have been undertaken with all stakeholders.
Dr Spio-Garbrah also assured GUTA members of his commitment to strengthen and empower women traders to move from table tops to shops, stores and factories.
He called on the executive to form partnerships among themselves in order to enhance their capitalisation and move into the manufacturing sectors.
�It is better to have 25 per cent stake in a multi-million cedi company than to be a 100 per cent owner of a GH�100,000 company,� he added.
On the issue of protecting retail business, he stated emphatically that there was no law that banned non-Ghanaians from retail businesses but rather the GIPC Act which prohibited non-Ghanaians from �petty trading� in designated markets.
There is a lot of misconception about this in the media, so the minister has appealed to the media to give accurate interpretation of the GIPC Law 2013, Act 865.
�Following the meeting with Her Ladyship, the Chief Justice, it came out that we need to have a strong prosecution team who can gather hard evidence to prosecute those foreigners who are breaching Ghana�s laws. We cannot take people to court for prosecution only for them to be set free because we did not do our homework well. A team is being trained as prosecutors and when this is done, prosecution will start to serve as a deterrent to others,� he said.
The President of GUTA, Mr George Ofori, for his part, bemoaned the ejection of Ghanaian traders by Ghanaian landlords in favour of foreign nationals.
He noted that GUTA was not against investment by foreigners in Ghana, but rather against those doing petty trading in the designate markets to the disadvantage of the indigenes.
Mr Ofori appealed to the minister to urge the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to compel those foreigners who had removed inscriptions of their business names from their stores in an attempt to hide their identity to display their company names as required by AMA bye-laws.
He believes this will fast-track the prosecution process.
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