By Awa Gassama
As essential commodities in markets becoming very hard to afford for shoppers especially low income earners, vendors at the Serrekunda Market lamented that lack of price control is responsible for price hike in the market and it’s making their struggling goes in vain.
Momodou Jallow, one of the petty traders in the market, said selling now becomes difficult especially in the market. He explained that he always takes goods from wholesalers on credit to sell and pay back.
“But at the end you will realize that you only struggle for the wholesalers because you will finish selling with minimal or no profit after paying back the goods taken on credit,” he declared.
This, according to him, makes it difficult to make ends meet “though I’m young and hard working man but lack of price control in the country is slowing down businesses and really dwindling young people’s efforts to nothing.”
Young Jallow, like other traders in the market, wants government to intervene especially now that people in the holy month of Ramadan so that the hardship in feeding can reduce.
Waka Njie, a purchasing officer in one of the event planning firms, said the country is already suffering from galloping inflation as prices keep on jumping high everyday without any control mechanism put in place “sometimes at the market you will get confused because of increase in prices of the items.”
“Everything in this country is hard especially food stuff. This makes feeding hard. If you are involved in the selling of food items, it becomes harder to make profit. Take note of this, a time will come when people might not be able to bear it further and the result could be disastrous,” Njie expressed.
Lamin Barrow said hiking of prices by suppliers is making business difficult in this country. He observed that if this high price continues without any regulation, survival will become harder and businessmen and women will end up giving up.
“I challenge the government to look into this issue, we are citizens of this country and our worry should be taken into consideration. Life is super hard. This should be a top priority of our government,” he added.
