Belgium Businessman Left Ghana Due To Persistent Demands For Bribes To Construct The Chocolate Factories In Mexico and Guatemala

Products made from cocoa beans are sold at the customers’ shop in the “Chocolate Museum” in Antwerp, Belgium. Photo credit: Joel Savage

Bribery demands prior to contract awarding are a regular occurrence in the NPP government. However, one foreigner, who was planning to use Ghana’s cocoa beans to build a chocolate factory, was forced to flee the country because all government departments he went to obtain the necessary documentation to start his business demanded bribes. This was so concerning to him that he eventually left the country to establish his chocolate factories in Mexico and Guatemala.

Any healthy economy is built on foreign investments and the establishment of businesses in Africa. As such, the Ghanaian government ought to have acted professionally to encourage more foreign investors to establish businesses in Ghana, but the challenges these investors face there frequently deter them. Every authority or office they visit, after they begin working on their plans, wants a bribe from them. This is a really awkward situation that has persisted for a while.

Despite having read about it, I was unaware that yesterday I would be meeting one of the victims and hearing about his tragedy in Ghana. He explained that he chose Ghana because the country produces cocoa and that he also believes that building up chocolate factories there will be beneficial because it will create jobs in addition to obtaining the beans he wants. But when things didn’t go as planned and he was disappointed by the demand for bribery at a factory he hadn’t started, that discouraged him.

He said that even if the firm is successful, individuals will let him down due to the way things are going, which means that eventually the business will fail. In light of this, his partner looked for other options and traveled to another nation that grows cocoa beans. After making that choice, they reasoned that the desire for bribes might be a widespread issue in Africa; as a result, they completely neglected the continent and moved elsewhere, where they were successful in Mexico and Guatemala.

Despite not having any cocoa plants, Belgium is the richest European nation in terms of chocolate production. Therefore, it calls into question the morality of African leaders as to why many African countries, like Ghana, produce cocoa but many of their citizens, including farmers, live in extreme poverty, while non-cocoa-producing nations in developed nations, like Switzerland, are wealthy in chocolate production. More significantly, a large number of the children are in child labor.

Read further: https://www.modernghana.com/news/1270800/belgium-businessman-left-ghana-due-to-persistent.html