Cedi suffers when you travel to Maldives, other destinations for tourism – Dep Finance Minister

Deputy Minister of Finance, Dr. Stephen Amoah, has admonished Ghanaians to visit local tourist sites instead of travelling to places like the Maldives because the cedi suffers when Ghanaians change cedis to dollars for such visits.

He attributed the perennial cedi depreciation to the conversion of the local currency into other foreign currencies, especially US dollars for international travel.

Furthermore, Dr. Amoah maintains that if Ghanaians support local hospitality services and tourist attractions, the money spent will stay within the country, contributing to national development.

Addressing business owners at the second CEO’s Breakfast Meeting in Accra on Thursday, May 16, the Deputy Finance Minister also called on owners of these hospitality businesses and tourist sites to expand their operations and attract locals to patronise their services.

Additionally, he emphasised that Ghanaian businesses need to gain a competitive advantage over their international counterparts in other countries to attract foreign direct investment (FDI).

“I think the strategic actors and players in tourism in Ghana should do their best to attract more tourists within the sub-region…We also need to create the needed competitiveness…,” he said.

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“We need to build homegrown policy tools that specifically address our needs… It’s not every day that we have to go to the Maldives… let’s come home. The monkeys are there… we always talk about the cedi; if you exchange dollars and go there [outside Ghana], why won’t the cedi suffer? But if we stay here and the dollar people come here, there will be a demand for our currency.”

He revealed that the government aims to elevate the tourism sector to new heights if the New Patriotic Party wins the general elections on December 7, 2024.

Meanwhile, the cedi is currently trading at GHC14.85 at various forex bureaus, with the inflation rate at 25.0%. Bloomberg has predicted that the cedi’s value will depreciate further by the end of the year. It is expected to sell at GHC15 to a dollar by next week.

Meanwhile, economist and professor of finance at the University of Ghana, Godfred Bokpin, has observed that the cedi will witness short-term stability and continue depreciating again.

Responding to whether the Cedi will witness some long-term stability, he said, “It will take a rest and then it will continue to depreciate.”

“There will be relative stability and then the depreciation will continue. That has been the pattern of the Cedi since it was introduced in July 1965. Even if we did everything, we still expect that the Cedi will depreciate by a certain margin given the relative strength of our economy, given the other economies that we interact with and that will only be consistent with the objective of price stability.”

He further underscored that the managers of the economy have not significantly improved the macroeconomic indicators over the years, contributing to the continued fall of the currency.