In 1960, and by a Legislative Instrument (LI), the President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, acquired a land measuring 57.8 hectares at La, in the Accra metropolis, to serve as an international fair ground to support and give stimulus to newly independent Ghana’s industrialisation drive.
Actual constructional work on the site started in 1962, to prepare the ground for Ghana hosting its first international trade fair in February, 1966.
It was Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s dream to create a platform where local businessmen/women will trade in merchandise with their foreign counterparts to enhance the country’s industrial and commercial development agenda.
The International Trade Fair Centre was also to be part of the government’s massive industrialisation programme after independence with the hope that the fairs would help to expand inter-Africa trade with other continents.
President Nkrumah never lived to see his dream come to fruition. On February 24, 1966, the month and year the first fair was to be held, President Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party (CPP) government was overthrown by soldiers generally believed to have been inspired by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
A year later in February, 1967, Ghana hosted its First International Trade Fair at La in Accra. Since then, the centre has hosted other major fairs and grand sales. But whether the dream of Ghana’s first President to use the fairs as a marketplace to exhibit Ghana’s industrial capabilities has succeeded or not will be a subject of great national debate.
What is easy to tell is that the fairs have lost focus and have in the main become markets for people to go and buy and sell mostly foreign goods which have dominated the Ghanaian taste.
It became increasingly sad to observe over the years that the fairs have virtually become monotonous, with foreign goods/products being the dominant exhibits. In effect, the fairs have encouraged importation of more foreign products as against encouraging the exportation of locally manufactured goods. Most of the fairs cannot, therefore, be said to be in favour of local entrepreneurs and industrialists.
The collapse of most of our local industries which were rubbing shoulders with foreign ones in the immediate post-independence era is a clear manifestation of how local industries were squeezed into extinction because of lack of external markets for their products.
As stated earlier, the fairs were instituted mainly to showcase the country’s industrial/manufacturing potential to foreign partners. They were also to offer the opportunity to local entrepreneurs to interact and exchange ideas with their foreign counterparts; serve as fora for technology and know-how transfer and promote product diversification.
In short, the international trade fairs were to provide local manufacturers the opportunity to showcase what Ghana had to offer on the local and international markets.
Unfortunately, there was a shift in focus in succeeding years from promoting local industry to trading activities where foreign goods were in full dominance.
As Made-in-Ghana goods began to take secondary position at the fairs, a new phenomenon also started emerging and became well-established. The trade fairs became more or less food fairs which served the interest of food vendors and drinking bar operators more than the industrialists, manufacturers and entrepreneurs that they were primarily meant for.
On countless occasions, exhibitors complained that they were not able to make any serious business with their trading partners as the fair grounds became a giant eating and drinking spot for the thousands of visitors who thronged the place for the duration of the fair.
Following closely the dwindling fortunes of locally manufactured goods is the deterioration of the physical structures on the land mass which constitutes the Ghana International Trade Fair Centre. Since the facility was built in 1962 to host the first international trade fair, the centre has seen very little renovation. Facilities at the place have not improved and expanded to accommodate changing trends.
The centre, which has come under different managements including the Ghana Trade Fair Authority and the current Ghana Trade Fair Company, is still not fenced and secured against marauders and miscreants who invade the place at will to loot or use part as a place of convenience.
Several promises have been made in the past to upgrade the Ghana International Trade Fair Centre, but they are yet to be transformed into real action. Activities at the fair grounds usually come to an abrupt end whenever there is power outage. Some of the exhibitors will tell you water does not flow on regular basis and toilets do not work.
Gradually, the place is losing its international status and can best be described as a hawkers’ market. What was widely advertised as national grand sales turned out mainly to be a gathering of street hawkers who lost space in the Central Business District of Accra as a result of Accra Metropolitan Assembly’s decongestive exercise. There was nothing close to trade fair activities apart from buying and selling of goods from second-hand clothing to anything imaginable.
When Osagyefo Dr Nkrumah acquired the land in 1960 for the construction of the Ghana International Trade Fair Centre, the last thing that would ever have crossed his mind, if he were alive, was that one day, we shall descend to the lowest level of turning our international trade fair centre into a market for second-hand goods. The spirit behind the Ghana International Trade Fair is dead and in its place has sprouted the clear signals of national decay.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com
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