Gabriel Kumi, Vice-president of the LPG Marketers Association
The Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Marketers Association says the price of LPG will go up from Monday, October 18, 2021 irrespective of the removal of the Price Stabilisation and Recovery Levies (PSRL) for the next two months.
For LPG, consumers will be cushioned by only 14 pesewas as a consequence of the removal of the PSRL.
However, the price of LPG is expected to go up by about 40 pesewas per kilo from next week.
The Vice-president of the LPG Marketers Association, Gabriel Kumi, in an interview in Accra yesterday said the consumption of LPG had gone down and the situation was getting dire.
“Obviously, any measure to cushion consumers in the form of price reduction is welcomed by our association. But we are of the view that we should be able to manage the expectation of the consumer because the fact that this tax is going to be suspended does not necessarily mean the price of petroleum products is going to go down.”
“If you take a product like LPG for instance, by Friday, October 15, 2021 which is the beginning of the next window, price of LPG is supposed to go up by 40 to 50 pesewas per kilo. Now the price stabilization levy is about 14 pesewas, so even if Ghana succeeds in implementing the price stabilization levy on Friday, what it means is that price of LPG is going to go up by about 26 pesewas to 30 pesewas”, he said.
Despite this, Mr Kumi expressed delight that the government was responding to its call to remove existing taxes on LPG and encourage many Ghanaians to use the fuel product.
“We are also excited that gradually government is beginning to reason in our persistent and consistent call for the removal of taxes from a product like the LPG because currently, the consumption of LPG is on a decline. We are not growing as we should because of high prices,” he said.
He added that the consumer was presently paying ¢7.8 per kilo of LPG adding that “our projection is that by December 2021, if we don’t take serious measures to reduce price of LPG we should be buying LPG at about ¢10 per kilo”.
He said “This is going to throw away a lot of people from consuming LPG which is very dangerous for our environment and very dangerous for mother Ghana. So we would want to renew our call on the government to consider removing the existing taxes on the LPG as we always said this is a product we need to subsidize”, he stressed.
He mentioned that some neighboring countries have subsidized LPG, adding, “but in Ghana, we put as much as 20 percent tax on the product and this is seriously affecting consumption and we call on the government to do something about that.”