Cost of doing business in Ghana detrimental – Nana Osei Bonsu

The CEO of the Private Enterprise Federation (PEF), Nana Osei Bonsu says government of Ghana has made it difficult for private entities to conduct business to ascertain profits.

According to him, although government claims that it has created an “enabling environment” for businesses to thrive, that is not so in practice, especially in the Energy Sector.

In his view, government does not take progressive actions to investigate the true state of how private organisations can work to reduce its burden and produce scalable results.

“Government has created an enabling environment, this phrase is loaded is not just laws and policies that don’t lend themselves to support…the cost of cost is the highest outside of Gabon in Africa. The cost of doing business is detrimental,” he said.

Explaining this, he said the Energy Sector and government’s inability to make room for private compnies to effectively explore the field is the main reason Energy Tariffs keep increasing at an abnormal rate.

In his view, the cost of energy production and generation can be inexpensive if qualified private entities were given the mandate to regulate it.

“This energy that we sit on is very expensive, why should that be?” he quizzed.

Speaking to JoyNews’ Evans Mensah, he disclosed that the Private Sector Enterprise Federation in partnership with the Council of Scientific Research was initiating a program sponsored by UNDP that could lower the cost of generating energy through solar and waste management by 40%.

“These are things that we can do, its not always for government to be in the middle…to make sure that the energy is this and that is the pricing”

“Energy is a very important item in the provision of business services and if you keep increasing it we don’t have much of a choice, it is like food…we can provide energy to different players at 40% below cost,” he stated.

The PEF CEO further urged that government give private organisations the opportunity and resources to scale up ideas that has the main intention of moving Ghana forward.

“What we need is financial support, if we get the financial support, from various investors, we should be able to provide about 100 different areas,” he added.