If immediate action is not taken, Ghana will soon have a fuel crisis, according to Alex Mould, the former Chief Executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).
According to a Facebook post by Alex Mould, the country may soon experience fuel shortages because businesses that import oil products are running out of the foreign currency they require to do so.
He said that because the Bank of Ghana is also out of foreign exchange, these enterprises are not receiving the necessary foreign exchange.
Without government intervention, a fuel shortage is looming due to the foreign exchange (FX) credit constraint. To pay for expiring Letters of Credit (LCs) provided to global oil trading firms like BP Vitol, Trafigura, etc., banks are claiming a lack of foreign currency.
This is because the Bank of Ghana was unable to fulfill the conditions at the different FX auctions. Since the volumes necessary by the petroleum importers are simply not available, several Banks have even stopped quoting FX prices (BDCs). As a result, BDCs are reaching the maximum amount of their credit line limits with their banks, which means that moving forward, the banks will no longer have credit lines available for the BDCs to import fuel.
Alex Mould added that the government must speed up processes to get an International Monetary Fund bailout to help avert the situation.