Suspicions of Silent Collusion Grow as Cement Prices Rise in Lockstep

A Sudden Jump, Same Day, Same Amount On the morning of February 27, 2025, retailers across Accra, Kumasi, and Takoradi quietly adjusted their price boards. A 50kg bag of cement now cost GHS 120, up by roughly GHS 9 overnight.

It wasn’t just one brand. From Ghacem to Dzata, Supercem to CIMAF, the hikes landed within the same window, with near-identical explanations: rising port tariffs, higher energy bills, and volatile exchange rates.

For builders and consumers, the effect was instant. But for analysts, the pattern was harder to ignore: why did competing brands raise prices by the same quantum, at the same time?

A Law on Paper, Defied in Practice Last year, government introduced the Pricing of Cement Regulations, L.I. 2491 (2024), requiring all producers to submit ex-factory prices every month. The aim was transparency.

By May 2025, regulators admitted that not a single manufacturer had complied. No price records. No audits. No sanctions yet.

Without that data, Ghana’s Cement Manufacturing Development Committee cannot independently verify whether price hikes are truly driven by costs — or something more coordinated.

Costs Did Rise — But Do They Tell the Full Story? Cement producers argue they face unavoidable shocks:

Energy tariffs rose by 14.75% in the first half of 2025, with another PURC increase of 2.45% in July.

Port charges were revised, though by an average of only 4% on dollar-denominated items.

Global shipping costs and import bills for clinker and gypsum remain high.

But here’s the contradiction: by mid-2025 the cedi had strengthened significantly — yet cement prices stayed stubbornly high. By August, a bag still sold for GHS 90 to GHS 120, with top brands refusing to budge from the upper end.

If foreign exchange was the main culprit, why didn’t prices fall when the cedi recovered?

Developers and Consumers Cry Foul The Ghana Real Estate Developers Association (GREDA) has warned that rising cement prices are making housing increasingly unaffordable. Projects budgeted on older price assumptions are stalling.

Civil society groups have gone further, arguing that without transparent price disclosures, parallel pricing begins to look like tacit collusion.

Meanwhile, ordinary Ghanaians — from small-scale masons to families building single rooms — are bearing the cost. A project that required 500 bags of cement now needs an additional GHS 4,500 to GHS 5,000 just to cover February’s increment alone.

Regulators Under Pressure Government now faces uncomfortable questions:

Why has the L.I. not been enforced?

Why are manufacturers allowed to ignore legal obligations?

What mechanisms exist to test whether price hikes match real cost movements?

Without answers, suspicion only grows.

The Bigger Picture: Cartel or Market Power? To be clear, no hard evidence has surfaced of cement companies sitting in a room to fix prices. What’s visible is parallel pricing: moves that look alike, sound alike, and hurt consumers the same way.

Economists call this tacit coordination — when dominant players in a concentrated market don’t need to collude explicitly because each knows the other will follow suit.

In a country where cement accounts for 40–50% of building costs, even small synchronized increases ripple across the economy.

Closing Analysis: A Market Too Important to Ignore The pattern of February’s hikes, the refusal to disclose ex-factory prices, and the stickiness of cement costs despite a stronger cedi combine into one conclusion: Ghana’s cement market is operating in shadows.

Whether this is cartel behavior or simply unchecked market power, the result is the same: ordinary Ghanaians pay more, while accountability stalls.

Until regulators enforce the law they themselves introduced, the question will linger: Are cement prices in Ghana rising because of costs — or because no one dares to stop them from rising together?