Pratt: NDC Must Say Goodbye To Power Should They Increase Petrol Repetitively Before 2012

    0
    36

    Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has cautioned the ruling National Democratic Congress government to start kissing power goodbye if it intends to pursue its fuel price deregulation policy into elections 2012.
    He said the masses are reeling under harsh living conditions and can no longer bear any petroleum price increases, however it appears to him that the government stopped thinking about the consequences of their actions a long time ago and has thus become insensitive to the plight of its people.
    Describing as dishonest, claims that the government, or any before it, had been subsidizing fuel prizes in the country and therefore saving consumers some cost, Pratt said there can be no truth whatsoever in the claims because they are all lies.
    “Now beyond this fact of real prices of crude and how the price is calculated and so on, we are also told that look, the government is subsidizing crude oil, subsidizing petrol, and that the economy is in such bad straits that indeed if the government continues to subsidize, it will not have money to cater for other needs of our citizens and so on.
    “I insist on this platform, I insist, and I’m ready to argue with anybody in this room, that there is no subsidy whatsoever on any petroleum product. You can only arrive at a subsidy if you use an accounting trick, and we know the trick…”
    Pratt, who was speaking as a panelist at a public lecture organized by the Committee for Joint Action and the Socialist Forum on the recent petroleum price increases on Tuesday, which also featured the CEO of the National Petroleum Authority, Alex Mould, said the government had heaped huge taxes and levies on petroleum products and was actually making profits.
    It was therefore dishonest for the government or its appointees to suggest that the government was shouldering any subsidy.
    “At some point, I think when petrol was selling for ¢12,500 (GH¢1.25), together with Mr. Ato Ahwoi and all of them, we sat down and did the calculation. When we did the calculation, the actual price that the consumer needed to pay, i.e. cost of refinery and margins and so on, it came to just a little over ¢6,000. So at that time if you went to the pump to go and buy fuel, 50 percent of the price you were paying was taxes and levies…, but the point I am making is that, if you sell a product and you make even 20 per cent profit, how can you be subsidizing that product? Because the taxes and levies are profits, they are additions that are added in order to increase government revenue, so if government is making so much revenue, how can the same government now turn round and argue that it is subsidizing the product? It doesn’t make sense. It simply doesn’t make sense at all, and I want somebody to explain that.”
    Pratt said the only way to arrive at a subsidy is to discount the taxes and levies, and while it is agreeable that the government needs revenues through taxes and levies to build infrastructure and needed facilities, such provisions will have no value if they come when the people for whom they are intended are dead, saying the hardship on the masses is unbearable.
    “We agree, that the taxes will make us build more motorways, the taxes will make us do wonderful things, build new hospitals and so on, but the people of Ghana must live to enjoy those facilities. The rate at which petroleum prices are moving, the recklessness with which the prices of all goods and services are rising, Ghanaians will die before that paradise that our taxes will create comes into being, and that is why it is important for our leaders and governments to rise up to the occasion and to deal with the most important things now and the most important things are food for the people, shelter for the people, clothing for the people – these are the most important things now.”
    According to Kwesi Pratt, he was shocked beyond measure that any government in tune with the sufferings of its people would announce petroleum price increases as early in the year as January 4, wondering why the government appears to be in so much hurry to court public anger.
    “…I could not believe that anybody, any government, which knows the conditions of the people in Ghana, would announce a 30 per cent increase in the price of petroleum products on 4th of January. What is wrong with these people? It is like they are in a hurry to court public anger. 4th of January when people have just come out of Christmas with all the wahala… even if you have to announce it, do you announce it on the 4th of January?…. Incredible, it is like they stopped thinking a long time ago. They are no longer sensitive, they don’t care about us… They don’t think about the social and political consequences of their actions.”
    “I stand here and make one prediction, I do not speak as a prophet of doom, I speak as somebody who has lived all of my life in agitation on the streets and know the problems of the people. If this reckless policy is not abandoned, the NDC must begin to say goodbye to power because if they increase the prices of petrol again and again before 2012, that would be the end of the NDC in power. That is the fact, whether you like it or not, that is the fact… The people of Ghana are not ready to take any more reckless increases in the prices of petrol, and it does not matter what calculations you do, the simple fact is that we can no longer bear the hardship.”
    But Pratt also cautioned the public to guard against being hoodwinked to join any politician’s selfish agitations because they only appear to think properly when out of power.