Private businesses are lamenting the power crisis is still taking a heavy toll on their operations.

A number of companies which are reeling under crisis have already laid off several workers, in a bid to mitigate the impact.

According to the Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, GCCI, the crisis has compounded the woes of local enterprises by shooting up the cost of doing business in the country.

This came up as a highlight of the breakfast meeting organized by the GCCI for over 100 CEO’s to deliberate on topical issues relating to the development of local businesses.

The meeting was under the theme “Building the capacity of Enterprises for the International Market: A tool for sustainable economic growth”.

The meeting was to primarily fashion out ways making local businesses more competitive on the global market.

The CEOs generally indicated the current power crisis is a major constraint to their bid to boost local exports. This, according to them, is because the crisis has unduly increased their cost of production – making them uncompetitive on the international market.

The Business Development Manager of Tropical Cables and Conductors Limited, Nana Kwame Oteng-Gyasi said “the power crisis has made us lose about 30% of our production. We do in excess of 5000 tonnes annually and so if we’ve lost 30 percent of that, essentially the taxes we pay to government would also come down because we pay taxes based on our sales. We’re also looking at downsizing now even though we don’t believe in that. So I hope the situation would improve soon”.

GCCI’s President, Seth Agyei Baah after the event also outlined to Joy Business how the crisis coupled with the cost of credit remain the major constraints to the export agenda. 

“Of course we cannot talk about competition when you know you don’t have the advantage of bringing down your cost. That is the biggest challenge because we are in a system where we’re borrowing around 40 percent, about the second highest in Africa and others at an interest rate of as low as 3 percent, we’re already disadvantaged.

“It means our products would invariably be higher in cost because of the high input-cost. Secondly we’re also still having a challenge with supply of energy. If I have to buy fuel to supplement production at an extra cost, it has to be put as part of the production cost. This makes our products relatively expensive – making us uncompetitive on the international market,” he noted.