The Bolgatanga Central MP said in an article that the decision replace the West Blue and GCNet with the UNIPASS system is tantamount to replacing the best system for the worst.
“The Akufo-Addo-Bawumia government is ready to abandon the tried and tested system that the GCNet and the West Blue built for the country for something neither the government nor its promoters have been able to say makes it worth the consideration, talk less of being superior to what we already have in place. They have set in motion a clandestine move to abandon the best for the worst and turnaround and give the best’s platform to the worst to transact business,” Mr. Adongo, who is a member of the Trade, Industry and Tourism Committee of Parliament said in an article.
The National Democratic Congress legislator and other industry stakeholders have criticised the UNIPASS deal since it was signed in February this year.
The deal was signed by the Trade Ministry on behalf of the government and it hands over the current port management systems which were being run by GCNet and West Blue to Ghana Link and its UNIPASS team.
According to Mr. Adongo, for decades, Ghana has been at the forefront of leading innovations in trade facilitations in the subregion due to the systems developed by GCNet and West Blue.
These innovations, Mr. Adongo notes, follow a series of dialogue, research, feasibility studies, and surveys that identified lapses in the system and sought credible mechanisms to reverse their impact on trade flows and the bottlenecks to revenue generation.
“The successful deployment of these initiatives have not only helped to minimise inefficiencies and improved revenue generations in Ghana’s twin ports, but they have also enhanced Ghana’s image as a destination of choice for traders in West Africa,” he said.
According to him, the GCNet West Blue system, combined with other initiatives by other stakeholders in the sector, have ensured that trade flows into and through the ports have enjoyed strong growth (until recently), resulting in more revenues generated for the state.
“In the business sense, these initiatives have also helped to position Ghana’s economy in an attractive light as positive scores in trade facilitation brighten a country’s chances of clinching a better spot in the World Bank’s enviable table of Ease of Doing Business,” he touted.
Resorting to 2015 figures to buttress his point on revenue generated by the ditched system, he said, the solutions by GCNet and West Blue were combined to provide an integrated end-to-end processing platform to deliver the Ghana National Single Window (GNSW), the Ghana Customs Management System (GCMS) and its Trade Facilitation Single Window Platform (TFP) -components to meet ISO 9000 and 27000 certification standards.
“The integration proved successful, resulting in government revenues consistently rising (except in 2019 when the government reduced benchmark values at the ports) to the admiration of all governments.
“The data shows that customs revenue generated through the system rose from GHC7.5 billion in 2015 to about GHC13.2 billion in 2018. This represented an accumulated growth in customs revenues between 2015 and 2018 of about 76%,” he said.
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