The Public Relations Officer for the Ministry of Energy, Nana Damoah says the government cannot intervene in the reduction of fuel prices.
Responding to calls for a reduction in fuel prices in the country to reflect the global reduction in crude, Nana Damoah said the price regulation policy will not allow the government to intervene for a reduction in fuel prices.
He said the next pricing window is on March 16 and he is hopeful the pricing will reflect the reduction on the global market.
“Let me explained that since June 2015 Ghana has been implementing a price regulation policy now what this means is that government is no more responsible for the price setting of petroleum products however we have some price indicators the petroleum price formula which everybody is aware of unfortunately for us in the building of that policy we decided that we are going to do reviews based on a bi-weekly policy..”
“Prices are reviewed every two weeks so whatever happened on the world market we have some stability but we can only review prices within two weeks, the next pricing window opens on the 16 of March government, therefore, government can not intervene at this point to cause a reduction in prices against the stated policy of deregulation.”
COPEC demands a 10% reduction in fuel prices
The Chamber of Petroleum Consumers, COPEC, is demanding a 10% reduction in fuel prices from Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs). The demand of COPEC follows the sustained decline in global crude oil prices.
The decrease has been attributed to the price war between Russia and Suadi Arabia as well as the spread of the coronavirus.
According to COPEC, consumers could be benefitting from a reduction of between 10%-32% compared to the 2% that consumers have been given over the past few weeks.
Chief Executive for COPEC Duncan Amoah added, the global price is expected to decrease further and it must reflect in our fuel prices in Ghana.
“In fact, if these petroleum service providers will be fair to all of us, anything below 10% will not be fair because your numbers as they speak, your prices are still dropping and it is expected that it will drop even further because Russia and Suadi are not done yet. ….technology is also going to suffer in one way or the other because the major producers will want to flood the market to kill the American production, will the Americans back down or they will also want to flood the market further.”