It is quite common to have some of his compatriots walk up to you while at home, or even at the office, to enquire if you have anything you wish to discard, and which could contain metal, iron or aluminium components.
Call them the scrap-busters or merely ‘korliba’, as they are commonly referred to, but their work, albeit tough and sometimes too intruding, offers many people the opportunity to trade their faulty equipment for some cash.
In some cases, these items are just given out to them for free, “after all, it is faulty,” they would retort.
For those who trade them for cash, what they get may usually be so small in comparison to the actual prices of the things they are giving away, but we must face the fact that they eventually do a better job at disposing off those things for us than we’d have ordinarily been able to.
From dragging their mini-trucks along with them as they walk around communities, these scrap dealers make sure that they gather as much as they need to be able – including discarded plastic, to also in turn trade them at factories who may need them, for other manufacturing purposes.
GhanaWeb TV’s Etsey Atisu caught up with Abubakar, a pretty successful ‘korliba’ who trades from his large scrap workshop from Klo-Agogo in the Yilo Krobo constituency of the Eastern region.
Abubakar, who has been in the business for some 12 years, told this reporter that without any meaningful job available for him to do, and from realizing how profitable the business is, is the reason he has been stuck to it for all these years.
“If you have a lot of money, you can make even more in it. If your supply is huge, you can make more from it. It also depends on the items you get. If they are light, you make little from them but heavy machines like engines and other heavy equipment, you make good cash from it. The weight determines what you make from it," he said.
He explained that many of his clients are located at Tema and that motivates him to do even meeting their demands.
