Accra, March 24, GNA – The Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), in collaboration with the police, visited some shops in Adabraka and took samples of their paints to test and ensure they conform to required standards.
The team, made up of three, inspected about 15 shops that sell paints within the enclave in the Greater Accra region.
Mr George Kojo Anti, Head of Special Projects, GSA, speaking to the media, said the exercise was necessitated based on the intelligence concerning the quality of paints on the Ghanaian market.
“We noticed certain people displaying products which they themselves admitted were of inferior quality or were substandard.
“In fact some persons said that the products they were displaying were not meant to be sold because they themselves knew that those products had some issues with quality or even in some cases had expired,” he said.
“We also noticed a very worrying occurrence where people had all manner of unlabelled products.
“Some had product labels which they would stick on these paint buckets upon purchase, and other people were mixing all sorts of things, different kinds of paints, into desired colours for consumers.”
Mr Anti stated that the incident was in flagrant breach of the relevant provisions of the GSA Act 1078, which prohibited even the display of products or goods that did not conform to applicable standards.
He said the products would be tested and subjected to all the relevant tests to see if they conformed to the applicable standards or not, and in the cases where they did not, the applicable sanctions in line with Act 1078 would be applied strictly to all offenders.
He said section 73 of Act 1078 of the GSA Act empowered the Authority to levy certain penalties on offenders.
“So what we normally do is that once we have the results of the tests and we realise that certain offences have been committed under the Act, we simply look at the applicable sanctions,” he said.
He said their work was not only to halt the sale of these substandard products but also to move the offenders from non-compliance to compliance after the applicable sanctions have been applied.
Mr Anti urged traders to be vigilant of the products they buy and ensure there were labels on them, adding that the government was interested in them doing good business and making a good profit.
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