It has emerged that the volumes of petroleum products exported by Ghana to its West African neighbour, Mali, has dropped significantly.

The situation has made authorities in Mali become worried due to the high quality of products from Ghana to the Malian market.

Deputy Director General of ONAP, Mali’s downstream petroleum regulator, Issa Kondo disclosed this in an interview when he led a delegation to pay a courtesy call on the Chamber of Bulk Oil Distributors (CBOD) in Accra, capital of Ghana.

According to him, the decrease in volumes of the products was the basis of their visit to Ghana. “Our mission here is quite simple. We are a landlocked country and, therefore, we import most of our products from different countries to Mali. We noticed that supply of products from Ghana has dropped significantly, so we thought it proper to come to Ghana to approach our Ghanaian counterpart to find out what the challenges are on the ground and together find solutions to the reasons for the drop in volume.”
He explained that aside engaging CBOD, they had also engaged with Ghana’s National Petroleum Authority (NPA) and Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation (BOST) Company Limited.

According to Mr Kondo, during their engagement with the NPA, they identified two key issues which he said were the contributory factor to the decrease in volumes of petroleum products to the Malian market.

He mentioned the bank guarantee which requires a 100 percent cash at the bank from companies and NPA’s exporting guidelines as the major challenges negatively affecting export trade between Ghana and Mali.

He, however, said together with the NPA, some steps have been to ensure that these two key issues are resolved immediately so as to reverse the current trend.

“Together with our partners in Ghana, which is the NPA, we have managed to come up [with] or identified some steps that we can take going forward to be able to increase the volumes between Ghana and Mali. So, we are just looking forward to the implementation of the various options and steps that we have identified. With the NPA, we really looked at the guidelines that they have in place for the exportation of petroleum products to Mali and, together we were able to identify certain bottlenecks preventing people from coming to buy fuel from Ghana,” he noted.

Source: www.energynewsafrica.com