Promote Consumer Financial Protection .Gov’ts Told

By Samuel Boadi

Consumers International (CI) has urged governments all over the world to ensure fair consumer financial protection for their citizenry.
The recommendations, which form part of this year’s World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, are in response to the G20 commitment to address consumer protection in financial services at the Seoul Summit in November 2010, where CI and consumer organisations from G20 and non-G20 countries fervently campaigned.
CI, in a recent press release, said the launch of the recommendations will take place on May 21, this year.
Joost Martens, Director General of Consumers International, said: “There are as many bank accounts in the world as there are adults and 150 million new consumers join the market for financial services every year. Yet consumers around the world – in both rich and poor countries – are continuing to get a raw deal from banks and other financial service providers.
“These ground-breaking recommendations are the product of a shared sense of anger within the consumer movement that the rights of financial consumers have been neglected for too long. They provide a clear and comprehensive set of demands to significantly improve financial protection for consumers everywhere.”
The report, ‘Safe, fair and competitive markets for financial services: recommendations for the G20 on the enhancement of consumer protection in financial services,” calls for a new international organisation to support work on financial consumer protection.
It called for a permanent international organisation to enable national financial consumer protection bodies to share good practice, issue public alerts and develop minimum standards and guidelines.
It appealed to national regulators with full authority to investigate, halt and remedy violations of consumer protection law, including the right to define specific practices or products as unfair, deceptive or otherwise illegal.
Calling for clearer contracts, charges and practices, it said regulators should introduce a requirement of comprehensibility to remove from the market products that do not meet minimum standards. Again, it said financial advice to consumers should be separated from sales-based remuneration.
On effective redress and dispute resolution, the report said consumers should have access to adequate individual and collective redress systems.
It also touched on measures to promote stability and safety of consumers’ deposits and investments, including separation of investment and retail banking divisions, bank ‘living wills’ with guarantees for protecting consumer deposits, and reform of insolvency procedures to change the rank of creditors to put depositors at the top.
The report called for competition in financial services to help reverse the market concentration, which has contributed to the creation of institutions that are 'too big to fail' and also remove barriers that discourage consumers from switching accounts.
It said financial service providers should be asked to take more responsibility of ensuring consumers receive clear, sufficient, reliable, comparable and timely information about financial service products.
According to James Guest, CI’s Vice President and CEO of Consumers Union of the United States, “The 2008 collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market was the starting point for what became the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis started with a failure of financial consumer protection and implementing CI’s recommendations will be a major step towards preventing such a catastrophe from ever happening again.
“Weak consumer protection in financial services is an unnecessary risk with disastrous consequences we cannot afford to repeat. We call on governments to pay urgent attention to the consumer movement’s demands.”
World Consumer Rights Day is an international day of action and awareness, observed by consumer organisations and civil rights groups around the world.
President John F. Kennedy on 15 March, told the US Congress: “Consumers by definition, include us all. They are the largest economic group, affecting and affected by almost every public and private economic decision, yet they are the only important group, whose views are often not heard.”

Where Are The Rights Of Ghanaian Consumers?

Not many Ghanaian consumers can tell of a time when they successfully sought redress from the courts of law on a product (both local and foreign), which they bought from the market that later proved to be substandard or fake.
There is currently no Consumer Rights Law to protect consumers, hence the exploitation of a lot of consumers in Ghana by some manufacturers. SAMUEL BOADI looks into this matter.

Asana Awudu lives at Abuja, a shanty settlement behind the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) offices at Accra Central.
The 30-year-old mother of two migrated from her hometown at Nyankpala in the Northern Region to look for greener pastures in Accra two years ago.
She cannot see anymore because an oil ointment she bought from a drug hawker to treat an eye infection has left her totally blind.
All efforts to help her regain her sight have proved futile and she cannot trace the one she bought the eye ointment from.
She used to sell fritters every morning in a glass container, which she carried on her head, and she was able to remit her two children in the village every month since her children’s dads had totally abandoned them.
Now she is a roving beggar on the streets of Accra perpetually impoverished because she cannot see.
As part of efforts to forestall such situations and educate consumers on what to look out for in products that the Ghana Standards Board (GSB), with support from a few corporate organizations, marked the International Day of the Consumer yesterday, March 15, 2011 in Accra.
Speaking to CITY & BUSINESS GUIDE in a telephone interview, Amponsah-Bediako, Public Relations Manager of GSB, said a lot of consumers in Ghana stand the risk of purchasing substandard products if they shop recklessly.
According to him, this was necessary because a lot of products in Ghana were manufactured in obscure places.
Noting that a good number of products also meet GSB’s required standards, he appealed to consumers to look out for the name and address of the manufacturer of any product they buy on the market, as well as the country of origin so that the manufacturers could easily be traced.
“The inscription should be in English including the manufacturing and expiry dates other than that users would find it difficult to understand how to use a particular product.
Consumers should also check the net content, volume and weight of products, the list of ingredients, especially for food and drugs and additionally pay attention to the energy efficiency ratings (capacity) of electrical appliances they buy.”
Calling on the national regulatory bodies such as the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), Food & Drugs Board (FDB), Energy Commision, among others to collaborate with GSB to educate consumers on their rights, Mr Amponsah Bediako said no headway would be made if consumers fail to pay particular attention to attributes of products.
Odame Darkwa, Deputy CEO, Food Division of the FDB, asked consumers to critically examine both local and foreign products they buy from the market.
“In the case of canned foods for example, consumers should always look out for the nature of packaging as to whether the cans have rusted, bloated or with defaced labels.”
He further tasked consumers to look out for substances they are allergic to so that they are not exposed to any health hazards.
“Consumers should therefore be careful, especially people who buy from vendors carrying food on their heads by the roadside. Most of these vendors do not have any means of refrigeration and thus exposes foods to a lot of infections.
Of special concern is sachet water. Most of the sellers look very unkempt and sell by gutters.”
Kofi Kapito, Executive Secretary of Consumer Protection Agency, also complained about the rate at which some embassies in Accra exploit Ghanaian visa applicants.
“The American and British Embassies have taken undue advantage of applicants in that when people apply for visas, they are denied the visas on flimsy excuses and their monies are not refunded to them. How can the mere processing of documents cost about $100? There is no place in the United States that the processing of visa costs this much.”
He said government needs to put measures in place to prevent telecommunications companies from exploiting consumers.
“These telecoms operators deceive consumers with a lot of messages and ask phone users to text messages to certain codes for prizes. It is the NCA that should do these things but appear to be in bed with these companies, hence the massive exploitation.”
Mr Kapito therefore called on government to speed up work on the preparation of the Consumer Rights Law to help fight manufacturers of products and services, who unduly take advantage of the Ghanaian consumer and walk away scot-free.
“Most Ghanaian consumers have had nowhere to take their concerns to particularly when their rights are being abused. When the Consumer Rights Law comes into force, there would be some sanity in the system,” Mr Kapito stressed.

Newmont Ahafo’s Resettlement Programme: Are Beneficiaries Satisfied?

By Samuel Boadi

AT THIS time and age where most countries in the world are inculcating several forms of modernity into their infrastructural development, especially in their mining areas, the same can still not be said of Ghana and one wonders why Government is just insensitive. Samuel Boadi delves into the issue.

NEWMONT GHANA started operations at its Ahafo Mine in January 2006, went into processing in June of that year and had its first gold pour on July 18, 2006. According to the company, it has made capital investments of up to $1 billion as at end of 2009 and paid royalties totaling $42.3 million as at end of the last quarter of 2009.
This is welcome news particularly considering the quantum of investment involved and the chain of employment it has created in addition to the compact benefits that have accrued to persons affected by the company’s operations.
Newmont’s Ahafo mine boasts of two primary ore zones - North and South, separated by the Bosumkese Forest Reserve. These entail 11 deposits over a 40-kilometer trend. As at 2008, its Ahafo south site had reserves of 5.9 million ounces while its north site had 3.2 million ounces.

Resettling Affected Farmers
In its quest to extract ore from certain locations in its concession, Newmont Ahafo embarked on a land access programme. This involved the resettlement as well as the livelihood re-establishment programmes.
Under the former, over 1,700 households were affected. These entailed some $17 million, while $16 million was spent on crop compensations and $22.3 million on the livelihood re-establishment. The latter encompassed the agriculture improvement and land access programme (AILAP), the vulnerable programme targeted at resettled households in Newmont’s two resettlement communities (OLA and Ntotoroso), skills development for income improvement (SDIIP), Ahafo Linkages Programme (ALP) and the Ahafo Agribusiness Growth Initiative (AAGI).
The affected communities thus established a Resettlement Negotiation Committee (RNC) composed of community representatives and traditional authorities who are independently nominated and validated to represent the people living in the area.
The RNC, which negotiated with Newmont on resettlement and crop compensation, comprised a former Inspector-General of Police, the District Chief Executive, the District Development Planning Officer, the traditional council, the Land Valuation Board and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.
Newmont says it spent $14 million to construct the two sites. The Ntotoroso Resettlement Village is located immediately south of the existing community of Ntotoroso and spans 398 acres (161 hectares) while the OLA Resettlement Village covers 126 acres (51 hectares) just west of the existing community.
For the first time, the homes and residential plots came with a legal title (99-year leases). Prior to Newmont's resettlement, residents held no titles to the lands they occupied because these were owned by the traditional families and landowners. The legal title has created “pride of ownership” among resettled residents because they now know the land they live on is their own. Residents who lost their residential land received a replacement plot in a resettlement village and farmers received monetary compensation for displaced crops.

Beneficiaries’ Reaction
In the case of Newmont Ghana, it says it acted on the recommendations of the RNC. But given the high status of the different personalities and government agencies that constituted the RNC on one hand, and the type of structures that have been put up in the villages – OLA and Ntotoroso, on the other, one would wonder whether the committee really did a satisfactory work.
Some beneficiaries of the resettlement programme who were interviewed by CITY & BUSINESS GUIDE at Ntotoroso recently on anonymity expressed dissatisfaction at the 10 ×12 dimension rooms that have been built for them.
The beneficiaries maintain the relatively short height of the buildings (without electricity yet), makes living in it slightly uncomfortable. It ranges from one bedroom to five bedroom houses. Each compound has a toilet very detached from the main building.
“We feel hot inside these structures. We were expecting that the structures would have some tint of modernity but since we had no choice, we had to accept these ones. After all, we could not have afforded them,” one wishing only to be known as Kofi told this reporter.
But Kofi Antwi Boasiako, Land Access Manager at Newmont Ahafo, stated in a telephone interview that Newmont played to the dictates of building standards of the Ghana.
“All of the previous structures owned by the affected farmers were farmsteads and these were in dimensions of 5 ×6, 5×7 and 5×8 huts. Also, all the structures have been approved by the Department of Town & Country Planning to conform to government’s development plan,” Mr Boasiako mentioned.
Yaw Antwi Dadzie, External Affairs Manager, Newmont Ghana, adds that Newmont Ghana has decided to improve the second phase of the resettlement project on its own by providing ample space within the new structures under construction and further initiate and compact other relevant facilities.
Newmont’s Ahafo and Akyem projects together have approximately 17.4 million equity ounces of proven and probable gold reserves, representing about 20 percent of Newmont’s global equity gold reserves (86.53 million ounces) as at end of 2008.
The Ahafo mine produces about 500,000 ounces of gold per annum from three pits while the Akyem project is in a feasibility phase.
Newmont is focused on sustainability and environmental best practices and is listed on the Dow Jones sustainability index world. It was recently certified under the International Cyanide Management Code.

E-Book On 2-Week Trial In Ghana

By Samuel Boadi

AMAZONKINDLE, an electronic book capable of holding as many as 1,500 books was on Friday introduced to Class 6 students of OrphanAid Africa Community Centre School at Ahienyah, near Dodowa in the Greater Accra Region.
Worldreader.org, the non-governmental organisation from the United States of America, whose brainchild is the programme, told DAILY GUIDE that it chose the village for the trial in order to acquaint itself with problems that might arise from the use of the books particularly among pupils in order to effect an appropriate updating.
“Ghana is the first country in the world to benefit from such a technology. It uses very little electricity. The battery could last for 2 weeks after charging it for an hour,” project co-founders - Mike Sundermeyer and David Risher have said.
After some short tutorials by the project co-founders, the children were seen easily operating the device with little supervision, accessing and reading several downloaded books. The kindle also has a dictionary and audio reader in addition to a selection of optional text sizes.
Worldreader.org is a foundation which aims at providing library books to children in the remotest parts of the globe.
“Education and literacy are key drivers to economic stability and growth. We need to embrace and develop these tools to ginger wider reading at little or no cost”. Mr Sundermeyer said the NGO will contact telecommunications companies in Ghana and for that matter the whole of Africa, to collaborate with Worldreader.org so as for their customers to access e-books via their mobile phones.
Already, the project co-founders have been in consultation with the Ministry of Education as well as the telecommunications networks to see how best the project could be channeled effectively to all schools in the country.
“This is just the beginning. We will in the near future download books on all the professional courses as well as academic materials onto it. With the kindle, a student at whatever level of education could access a horde of books, read extensively and research well.”
“E-readers can dramatically improve people’s access to books, and we’re proud of our ability to work swiftly to bring this new technology to the Ghanaian people”, Mr Risher indicated to this paper.
Selling at $250 in the US and other parts of Europe, the kindle would be highly subsidised and in most cases supplied freely to schools in Africa.
“Imagine carrying a lot of books in one single device. This is the beauty of the kindle. More important is its ability to design and download all syllabi and courses of study in Ghanaian schools at all levels. Again, it doesn’t need any bulky paper, ink and hard covers. This is paper-free and wholly digitalised.”

Aluworks Floats 75m Ordinary Shares

By Samuel Boadi

ALUWORKS is offering 75,000,000 ordinary shares of no par value at GH¢0.40 per share to current and prospective shareholders to raise GH¢30,000 to recapitalize its operations.
The offer is in the ratio of 9 new shares for every 5 existing shares, representing a 9 percent discount off the current market price of GH¢0. 44 per share as at Friday, March 12, 2010.
A.W.B. Barnor, Managing Director of the company, disclosed this on Monday in Accra at a meeting with the press.
According to him, the offer would initially be opened to shareholders.
“In the first instance, current shareholders are allowed 9 shares for every 5 that they already own. They may apply for more than their normal allotment if they so wish. Any shareholder who decides not to partake in the offer must fill an appropriate form to declare so, and must understand that such shares would be allocated to other interested parties,” he added.
Open to both resident and non-resident Ghanaians as well as foreigners, the offer, which began yesterday, ends at 5 pm on Friday, April 16, 2010 while trading in the rights, which also started yesterday, ends on April 9, 2010.
“The GSE has approved the listing of the 75,000,000 new shares to be issued on the first official list and as such trading in these shares would commence on May 12, 2010. Shareholders who wish to exercise their rights and renounces should contact NTHC Securities Limited, Adabraka, the manager and sponsoring broker of the ALW Rights Issue for assistance and direction,” he emphasized.
Explaining further, Mr Barnor said the performance of Aluworks on the GSE shows a creditable price trend since the listing of the company.
“From a listing price of GH¢0.1350 per share in November 1996, the equity grew gradually to hit an all-time high of GH¢1.25 on April 14, 2004.
“As at Friday, March 12, 2010, Aluworks traded at GH¢0.44, signifying a total growth of more than 225 percent over its listing price.
“In addition, the equity has been one of the most actively traded stocks on the exchange over the years,” Mr Barnor reiterated.
The MD added that the dividend history of Aluworks suggest that until 2007, the company had one of the best dividend payment records in the country, explaining that “it paid dividends each year until 2007. The average dividend pay-out was 68 percent.”
W.E. Inkumsah, Board Chairman of Aluworks, in a speech, said the company, which was set up in the late 1970s, started with one 15,000 tonne caster and a 30,000 tone cold mill, noting that “slowly it has increased to three casters of 15,000 tonnes each.”
He stated that there has not been an increase in cold mill capacity since that time, but the 30,000 tonne cold mill has served the company very well over the years because of the very high level of regular maintenance.
“The current cold mill capacity simply needs to be increased to meet the increasing demand that the company expects over the next few years.
“Half of the proceeds of the rights issue will be used to procure a brand new cold mill. The current cold mill will also undergo refurbishment. When that is finished and commissioned, we boast of a 50,000 tonne capacity that will be sufficient to meet the needs of West Africa and beyond.”
In 2006, when the country experienced deep energy crisis, which led to an increased disruption of supply from our traditional local supplier of ingots, the company had to import ingots with an attendant 33 percent increase in cost, which reduced the company’s profit margin.

Afriqiyah Awards Travel Agents

By Samuel Boadi

AFRIQIYAH AIRLINES, a Libyan carrier, on Monday honoured working travel agents who have supported its operations in Ghana with mouth-watering awards.
Ibrahim Hafida, Afriqiyah’s country manager for Ghana, who presented the awards on behalf of his outfit to representatives of the agencies, at the short but splendid ceremony, heaped praises on Seasons Travels, Kessben Travels, Kumasi Travels, Euro Tours, Satguru, Doscar Travels and also Nasa Travels for their immeasurable contribution to Afriqiyah’s success in 2009.
Other awardees included Escaville Travels and Logic Tours.
Mr Hafida appealed to the agencies to continue their good relationship with Afriqiyah adding the airline had more appreciation packages in the pipeline for them.
He also urged them to woo more customers aboard the airline this year so they could enjoy the exceptional fares, unrivalled services and cozy atmosphere.

Victory Bible Church Chalks 25 • Sets Up Mutual Fund, Others

By Samuel Boadi
THE LAUNCH of Victory Bible Church International’s 25th anniversary made history at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra at the weekend when its founder and Presiding Bishop, Rev. Nii Apiakai Tackie-Yarboi, dedicated the ceremony to the birthing of a mutual fund that will take care of members’ financial needs.
“The church has started a mutual fund called Victory Gold Club. This club is to make available financial resources to church members to run their businesses and meet other needs,” Rev Tackie-Yarboi emphasised.
According to him, the church which has in the last 25 years planted over 75 local and twenty-five foreign churches in addition to establishing a scholarship scheme to take care of its members’ educational needs, is bent on setting up a university college that will train cutting edge leaders who will contribute to the growth and development of Ghana and the rest of the world.
Additionally, Rev Tackie-Yarboi comments: “The church also, has a scheme that is taking care of widows and orphans. The victory care, which operates from the UK donated to the Tsunami and recently Haiti victims and have programmes for prison inmates in various correctional centres in the boroughs we find our churches.”
The church founder continued that the church will continue to share the good news and spread to other continents of the world.
“We will want the church to be more visible and relevant particularly in identifying projects that we can undertake to help make greater impact on the lives of people.”
On June 2, 1985, the church began as a small group known as Jesus People Outreach Centre at Kokomlemle with 62 people, 4 founding pastors and seven founding deacons. The pastors included the founder, Clement Amankwa Asihene, Elijah Patrick Saforo and Emmanuel Ackun.
Rev John Adotey, president of the Apostolic Church of Ghana and chairman of the Ghana Pentecostal Council (GPC), in a goodwill message, expressed gratitude to God for raising people for His Kingdom through Victory Bible Church International and its able leaders.
Advising church leaders to demonstrate exemplary leadership qualities and shun retreating into the trenches of evil, Rev Adotey also urged Christians to apply the teachings of the Bible in their encounter with people in their communities, workplaces and also in the nuclear family setting.
He appealed to them to allow Christ to be known through good acts instead of immoral ones.
Other ministers of the gospel who graced the occasion were Rev Charles Agyin-Asare of the Word Miracle Church International and Rev Joyce Aryee of Salt and Light Ministries.