Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the Information Minister, is calling for the political class to stop pretending and put the national interest ahead of self-serving political considerations. <\/p>\n
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This comes amid stiff opposition to the proposed electronic transaction tax (e-levy) by the minority in parliament. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe revenue generation measures since I started politics have never been exciting for Ghanaians. <\/p>\n
We always find the political class being hypocritical while the government defends it. The moment power switches hands, postures change. <\/p>\n
I think the political class should stop the hypocrisy because we all know that without confronting the revenue question, neither of us can fully develop the country to its full potential. <\/p>\n
We have got to stop the hypocrisy, confront the real issues and tell Ghanaians the truth.\u201d <\/p>\n
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The information minister spoke of how governments at times, necessarily, would have to make very difficult and unpopular decisions for the good of the society. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe revenue question is bigger than whether or not we are making some money from road tolls. <\/p>\n
The challenge we have in this country is that, legitimately, Ghanaians are demanding things from the government. <\/p>\n
The government has only two ways of responding to those demands. <\/p>\n
You either borrow or raise revenue. We are at a point where our debt to GDP ratio is close to about 80 percent. <\/p>\n
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It is not healthy for us to go further. We intend to raise some more revenue while plugging out the excess expenditure.\u201d <\/p>\n
The information minister said what everybody should do was to work together to ensure that revenues collected were properly accounted for \u2013 people must be held accountable for it. <\/p>\n
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta is urging Ghanaians to accept the e-levy, to end the situation where public sector workers and few other people in the informal sector continue to bear the burden of paying tax. <\/p>\n
The e-levy, he said, represented a good opportunity to bring more people into the tax net to boost domestic revenue mobilization. <\/p>\n
He added that \u201cthe e-levy represents our greatest opportunity to in the medium-term widen the tax base and meet the tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio of 20 percent as pertains among our peers\u201d.<\/p>\n
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