Vice President of the LPG Marketers Association of Ghana, Gabriel Kumi, has revealed that most fuel stations in the country have started experiencing shortages following the strike action by the tanker drivers’ union over poor roads in the country.

According to him, if government does not intervene and respond to the demands by tanker drivers in fixing poor roads, the impact will be unfavorable for Ghanaians. He indicated that government must not allow the situation to persist beyond tomorrow, otherwise, there will be serious consequences on the economy.

“As I speak to you now, most of our stations selling LPG have started drying up. Why must we wait to get to this? In as much as this will impact negatively on our business, we believe the drivers have legitimate demands that must be met as soon as possible and we urge the government to as a matter of urgency fix this problem so we can get back to work and normal life.”
Gabriel Kum

Commenting on the demands by drivers, Mr Kumi revealed that the legitimacy of drivers’ “concerns is obvious” and can never be questioned. He stated that it’s unfortunate that government has allowed the situation get this far.

“The situation has been like this for the past few years, I remember in 2021, they attended strike but we in the industry tired very hard to avert that strike. I remember at that time, the chief executive of NPA, Dr Mustapha Abdul Hamid, stepped in and organized some graders onto the site and they started working.
“But the point is that it doesn’t take the chief executive of NPA to fix this road. It takes commitment from the minister of roads and the minister of finance to fix these roads. So, I presume the chief executive of NPA did his bit and he left it. I mean, we should avert this because it’s a danger in waiting. Can you imagine an LPG truck overturning in front of TOR and there’s an explosion? The only refinery that we have will be in flames…”
Gabriel Kum

Government urged to fix roads leading to fuel depots

Furthermore, Mr Kumi stated that it is the work of government to fix roads and that if by “Wednesday this situation is not averted, we’ll start seeing queues in our refilling outlets across the country and if this should persist till Thursday and Friday, we are going to have a very serious problem”.

“… I can assure you within 48 hours we are going to see shortages in the system and if it should move to Thursday and Friday, movement of goods and services and movement of people will be curtailed. We don’t want to see this.”
Gabriel Kum

The Vice President of the LPG Marketers Association of Ghana explained that Ghana’s economy is still trying to recover from the impact of COVID and other challenges. As such, he noted that the last thing that should occur is shortage of gas which is needed to power the country, and is not being supplied by drivers as a result of an issue that could have been handled long ago.

“It’s about the commitment to get it done… It’s just a matter of mobilizing funds… It’s not only in Accra and Tema alone, if you go to Kumasi, Bope, Atuabo and Takoradi, the situation is the same. This is a source of very huge revenue for government. All the depots give government very huge revenue. So, what is it that we can’t attend to their roads? We appeal to government to step in immediately. We should not wait for more than 48 hours otherwise the consequences on our economy will not be too good.”
Gabriel Kum