U de tink u de bring vroom vroom?!

Anywho, so early this afternoon, I decided to do some research online about how much it'd cost to bring a car into Ghana.


Seeing as the last time we went around looking at new cars, they were shockingly expensive - we were quoted US$22,000 for the Toyota Yaris for goodness sake!!!! These are selling for about $11,000 in the U.S.!!!!! So I know when you bring in cars, you are charged duty and taxes (after you've paid for the car, and paid shipping and insurance to bring it in, of course!) I'll also try to find out more by going in person to the office tomorrow, I tried really hard to dig around, but only found the following sites:
• ghanahighcommisionuk.com
• info-ghana.com
• ghana.gov.gh
• cepsghana.org (supposedly, this is the site for info - CEPS means Ghana Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS), but it looks pretty commercial and not-ghanaian, so I didn't spend too much time on it. I still need to poke around and see what I can find)

Its probably old news, but from the UK consular site (the 1st site listed above), it seems that a car thats older than 5 years will get us being charged the least. Also, my Mum mentioned something about no duty being charged on "caravans" but I still haven't seen evidence of that with my eyes! I did see that a >10 passenger car has no duty charged, although tax is still charged.

So imagining the following scenario (I haven't looked into shipping or insurance rates, so this is all imagined!):
1. 5.5year old car bought for $5000
2. Shipped for $2500
3. Insured at $1000

Seems that assuming that the rates on one of the sites above is correct, they will end up charging 12.5% for the duty, and 12.5% for tax = a whopping 50% on the car value!
Also, this charge is levied/calculated based on (50% of the purchase price + shipping/freight + insurance on the car) - they call this Cost + Insurance + Freight (CIF)!!

So for my scenario above, my CIF would be a total of $8500. Which means, for my made-up scenario, they'll charge me 50% (duty + VAT) = $4250 (almost the same price I paid for the car!!) I mean, unless I'm missing something, that seems to be the way its going to roll! No wonder people are leaving the cars at the port - especially if they don't do their homework before shipping the car in the first place.



So that explains why cars are so expensive - you'd have to sell the $5000 cheapo car for at least $11000 to make a bit of money on it! Can you imagine? And if its younger than 6 years old, then the duty is even higher!!!! I'm still in shock...but I'll wait until I hear the verdict from the horses mouth before I have my fainting spell and tsk-tsk myself to sleep!

Just thought I'd share this news!

And I found this other site which was funny (or not so funny, depending on how you look at it), given my shock over the above:
Ghanaweb blog