The Eastern Regional Police Command is currently meeting Nigerian nationals engaged in retail marketing in Koforidua, following days of misunderstandings with members of the Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA).
This meeting has become necessary after some Nigerian traders, this morning, locked the shops of their leaders and vandalized some properties amidst threats, accusing their leadership of not doing their best to address the raging impasse between them and GUTA.
The Eastern Regional Public Relations Officer of GUTA, Darlen Nana Boateng, in an interview with Citi News, condemned the attacks and called on the Ghana Police Service to intervene.
“In the aftermath of the closure of shops of foreigners, the news today is that some young Nigerian traders have formed groups to vandalize properties and shops of the leadership of the Nigerian community. That is uncalled for. We will plead with the police to intervene, so that we can have an agreement with the leadership that there shouldn’t be hawking on the streets of Ghana as a whole, starting from Koforidua where the action was taken. Actually, the Nigerians could not bargain any further beyond accepting the fact that they are not supposed to do retail trading in Ghana.”
“So those who have shops said they were going to continue their distributorship and wholesale. So why would the others who are disadvantaged, specifically the younger ones who don’t have shops, come together to form a vigilante to destroy or vandalize properties of their leadership? I think that is uncalled-for,” Nana Boateng said.
