Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, Professor William Baah-Boateng, has urged the Bank of Ghana to enforce regulations that bar ordinary Ghanaians from buying dollars.
According to him, the indiscriminate buying of dollars on the foreign exchange market by Ghanaians who do not need the dollars for any form of transaction is partly responsible for how poorly the cedi has fared this year.
He noted that as the dollar is not a medium of exchange in Ghana, it should not be made readily available to just any Ghanaian who wants to buy it.
“And that is what it’s supposed to be because the dollar is not a medium of exchange in Ghana. People keep dollars as a store of value.
“And therefore if Bank of Ghana is able to strengthen that part and say that if you don’t have any dollar account, you don’t have anything about dollars and then you have your cedis and say I want to change my cedis into dollar when we know that you’re not an importer, when we know that you’re not travelling, when we know that you’re not using it to pay fees, Central Bank should not allow that,” he said.
Professor Baah-Boateng also stressed the need for forex bureaus to demand some form of identification from persons who come to buy dollars.
“And I think they can also go further as we have always said that going forward, the Central Bank should also make sure that people will not just walk into forex bureau and just change money as it were.
“They need to identify themselves with the Ghana card, with their passport, and that is the regulation that we talked about so that we don’t allow the market forces to determine anything as we have in the tomato market,” he said.