According to Mr. Duncan Amoah, Executive Director of COPEC, Ghana's gold-for-oil initiative is "obviously dead on arrival."

In his opinion, the program is having the opposite effect of what it was intended to have, driving up fuel prices at the pumps.

Following a 15% price hike, gasoline now costs GS15.4 and diesel GHS15.99.

Mr. Amoah stated on Class91.3FM's lunchtime news 12 Live that the Bank of Ghana should have maintained the gains it gained in regards to slowing down the depreciation of the cedi relative to the dollar, which, in his opinion, positively influenced fuel costs.

“We felt the Bank of Ghana should have worked to sustain the gains made by the cedi”, he said, adding: “Unfortunately, we’ve lost focus and are now banking hopes on a certain opaque programme that we titled gold-for-oil “.

“At the very time that the gold-for-oil programme has commenced, for which last week, BOST did put on the market some 41,000 metric tonnes of oil, the reverse is what is rather happening with Ghanaian pump prices, so, clearly, there was a solution we found in November, December to control the cedi depreciation that sort of worked, and for which we had prices drop in November, December and early January”, he explained.

“Unfortunately, we are now banking hopes on a policy or programme whose benefits we are unlikely to derive and that can be attributed to the fact that what was brought in last week made no impact whatsoever in bringing down prices. To the contrary, the prices at the pumps, as of this morning, have gone up by as much as 15 per cent”, he noted.