Multi-Billion Project Now a White Elephant

The multi-billion cedi Ghana Industrial and Commercial Estates Limited (GICEL) project situated off the Accra-Kasoa road, which is meant to bring together small and medium scale industries and commercial concerns for the rapid growth these enterprises has become a white elephant, as the target audience have abandoned the site.

Information available to this paper indicates that the site is currently, on paper, occupied mostly by retailers, largely with membership of Council of Indigenous Business Associations (CIBA); however, most of them have deserted the place for lack of market, thus leaving most of the shops in the ?42.7 billion structure inoperative.

The irony of the situation is that most of these retailers, it was established, rented the shops ostensibly to do business but are using them as warehouses where they keep their goods, while they do the real business elsewhere.

For instance, only one out of 80 spare parts dealers who have rented shops at the GICEL estate is actually doing business there, while the remaining 79 still sell their goods in other market centres, notably among them is the Abossey-Okai spare parts lane in Accra.

Management of GICEL, this paper can confirm, now has the headache of dealing with the 79 spare parts dealers who have rented shops at the premises, but are not using them for the intended purpose, and thus making a mess of investment in the project.

These revelations came to light when a five-man Parliamentary select committee on Trade, Industry and Commerce toured the facilities of the multi-billion cedi project Wednesday, last week.

Threats of evicting tenants who are not using facilities for the purpose for which they apparently rented them are lingering in court, management of GICEL told the Parliamentary team, led by Nana Asante-Frimpong, MP for Kwabre.

Briefing the MPs, Mr. David Kow Wilberforce, acting Managing Director of GICEL, attributed the failure of business at the site to a number of factors including, the heavy vehicular traffic on the Mallam-Kasoa road, and appealed for the police barrier to be relocated from its present location at Weija.

Meanwhile, a number of GICEL tenants this reporter interacted with blamed the low patronage of business in the area on the inadequate advertising the site had gained.

According to them, management of GICEL has not advertised the project well enough to attract customers so people do not even though such facility exists.

They held that even potential customers within the Kasoa environs do not know of facilities available, thus they by-pass the place to do business in the commercial centres of Accra.

The tenants however agreed with management that the Mallam-Kasoa road needs to be expanded to decongest the traffic situation so as to make the project site more accessible.