CULTURAL NEWS
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Pan-African Post Day
GHANA joined the rest of the world to celebrate the Pan Africa Post Day on Thursday, January 18, 2006. It is a day set aside by the Pan-African Union to create awareness in the minds of the public on the important role the Post plays in the development of countries. The theme for the celebration is “The Post at the Heart of Competition”.
The theme for the celebration is more appropriate and apt at this time when the challenges facing the postal industry are very formidable.
Liberalization of markets, changes in Information and Communication Technology and their effects have, since some years, plunged all economic activities into competition. As a consequence, the Post, a public service which initially used to be protected in the past by state monopoly, shielding it from possible fluctuations of the environments, must today adapt to market reality.
In Africa, and more especially Ghana, where liberalization has been total, public postal operations must show tenacity and initiative to be able to face the competitive environment to remain in business.
This means that postal operations must adapt to strategic re-orientation of activities in order to ensure survival and prosperity for their companies. The postal market in Ghana has seen a progressive competition. There is competition from all angles.
Not only that, in their markets approach, private operations tend to cream postal activities, leaving less profitable areas like the rural areas to public operations.
Notwithstanding this, we in Ghana Post must use leverage to stand up to this challenge. We hope to rely on our unmatched network of post offices located even in the remotest parts of this country to do business.
It is worthy of note that the introduction of ICT- based products such as electronic mail and the Internet, etc, have become imperative, in postal operations to meet the real expectations of modern-day customers.
We are repositioning ourselves to respond to the demands for efficient, postal services and to provide the customer what he wants. To this end Management is about to begin our counter computerization programme to make the company more competitive. When that is done, we will integrate Internet cafes as a core business into our business nationwide.
There will also be other new services which we will introduce, taking advantage of the opportunities that ICT will create for us. Bill payments for utilities, and money transfer services, improvement in counter services with particular reference to customer waiting time and improvement in mail transmission time are areas we are seriously considering.
The challenge now is therefore to diversify our operations to take advantage of the wealth creating capacities of new technologies to enrich the postal business to a winning enterprise. Competition and the introduction of ICT have taken a lot of business away from us but the same provides us with limitless opportunities to replace whatever revenue it takes away from us.
Therefore, on this Pan Africa Post Day, the management of Ghana Post will use all our ingenuity to face the increasing competition to be able to survive and be viable.
*Source:
The Daily Graphic - Saturday, January 27, 2007 Page: 10 |