Price of Petrol Increased by 64%

Ghanaian authorities on Friday announced a steep increase in fuel price saying the ex-pump price of petrol will go up by 64 percent.

Albert Kan-Dapaah, Minister of Energy, said a gallon of petrol would now sell at 10,500 cedis (about 1.5 dollars) while a gallon of diesel would now sell at 8,800 cedis (1.25 dollars).

The government said the Tema Oil Refinery has accumulated a debt of about three trillion cedis due to the unrealistic price regime applied in the past.

The steep rise, government officials said, were still below the recovery prices adding that a formula for automatic adjustment of prices would be announced soon.

Prices of petroleum products go up

Prices of four main petroleum products in Ghana, petrol, gas oil, kerosene and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) have been increased.

Mr Albert Kan Dapaah, Minister of Energy, on Friday told a press conference on Friday that Petrol now sells at 10,500 cedis per gallon,Gas Oil, 8,800 cedis, Kerosene,8,800 cedis and 2,200 per kilogram for LPG.He hinted that the increment which would be confirmed by the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) in due course is a definite measure taken to recover the operational cost of the refinery.

The Minister who was prevented by the minority to read his statement in Parliament due to procedural difficulties and had to resort to a press conference, said the economy would have collapsed irreversibly if the daily subsidy of over 6 billion cedis on petroleum products was allowed to continue.

"At the same time, the flow of petroleum products will have come to a grinding halt as we will simply not have been able to find the cedis to change into dollars to pay for crude oil imports."

He said had government decided to return prices to the levels of March 2000 when prices were last reviewed, today's adjustment would have been extremely high.

"We have not attempted to recover a single cedi of the 1.5 trillion loss which has been built up by the refinery as a direct result of subsidising prices for the past one year, indeed, if we had tried to recover this loss from the consumer, we would have had to increase prices by an average of 150 per cent."

Mr Kan Dapaah said " having taken this very painful but unavoidable decision, we have to ensure that never again must we allow ourselves to be placed in such a precarious and quite unacceptable situation."

He blamed the past government for not tackling the petroleum problem due to political opportunism.

"We have no intention of putting thenation's economic life to such peril again nor indeed of subjecting our people to cheap politicking which offers false relieves that only lead to greater hardships in the future when their votes are not at stake."

The Minister announced that he would institutionalise the formula that will adjust ex-finery prices automatically in line with international oil prices and the exchange rate of the cedi.

" The formula would be published in full next week, using prices announced today..so transparent will be the formula be that every Ghanaian living everywhere should be able to do their own calculations to verify future adjustments in ex-refinery prices."

Mr J.H.Mensah, Majority Leader, Mr Yaw Osafo Maafo, Minister of Finance, Mr Owusu Adjapong, Minister of Communications and other members of parliament attended the conference.