Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu
There is a lot of public and parliamentary discussions going on in Ghana about the 2021 budget statement read by the supposedly caretaker Finance Minister, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu (Hon.), on behalf of the ailing Finance Minister-designate, Hon. Ken Ofori Atta.
In the budget statement, the projections made as to how the government is going to raise money to continue to provide services to the people and to carry out her envisaged or targeted programmes and projects were made known. By the same money to be raised, the government can pay off some of her outstanding national debt and or reduce the accumulation of her debt.
To start with, how does a government raise revenue to run a nation? It does so through many means among which are the taxes (almost two-thirds of revenues come from the three workhorse taxes: income tax, National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and VAT), and the rest from other sources including “excise” taxes on products such as alcohol, tobacco and petrolenm; customs duties and taxes on imports of foreign goods (“tariffs”); estate taxes; and proceeds from the sale of national property.
The government can also raise money through the issue of bonds to service national debt. In sum, every government needs money to run its country.
In Ghana, in addition to the above ways of the government raising money, it earns money from the sale of products like cocoa beans, minerals like gold, manganese, diamond, etc. to foreign countries.
Ghana is a developing nation with her citizens having not only a taste for basic essentials but greater foreign luxuries. It takes money to acquire even the basic things that make life worth living let alone, the greater things that Ghanaians dream to have. In whichever way one thinks about developing the nation and meeting the wants of the people, money is needed.
The government cannot continually borrow from all the sources available to her to provide the necessary developments and freebies for the people without sinking the nation and throwing us under the grinding wheels of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the dominion of foreign countries and donors. Such total reliance on foreigners come at a great cost by the attached harsh conditionalities with the possibility of making us slaves in our own land.
Taxes are to be raised to meet the expected developments and the debt servicing of the nation. Therefore, all the opposing arguments being raised by the NDC Members of Parliament with their faithful and supporting malicious civil service organisations are neither here nor there.
When do they deem it most convenient to raise taxes if not now? They argue it is COVID-19 times where jobs have been lost with maximum reduction in economic activities, hence it is insensitive on the part of the government to increase taxes.
I shall in my next publication make comparisons with the United Kingdom to prove to Ghanaians how it is necessary for the projected increment in taxes to be made now or never.
Finally, their argument about the government of His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo incurring a huge national debt allegedly made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic is also seen by me as the usual dust-throwing propaganda by the power-conscious NDC who are so heartless to fool Ghanaians at any least opportunity that they get, all on intent to regain political power to come back and continue with their “create, loot and share” thievery.
The following data information on British government as sourced from their Office for National Statistics will let Ghana’s national debt and the
nonsensical hullabaloos being made by the mischievous NDC MPs and the NDC and their agents and assigns as regards Ghana’s national debt pale into nothing.
“How much money has the government borrowed? The latest figures are eye-watering. Government borrowing for this financial year has reached
£271 bn. That’s £222bn more than a year ago. This has pushed up the national debt to £2.13 trillion. That’s more than 99% of GDP – the value of goods and services produced by the UK. That has not happened since the early 1960s”: – BBC News published on March 3, 2021 under the heading, “Budget 2021: What is it and when will it happen?”
The above information was published on March 3, 2021 but in regards to the end of year 2020.
The President is able to revive the economy but not a life lost, hence his thought-out obligation to borrow to save Ghanaian lives, then to find a means to pay off the debt and to continue carrying on serving the people as best as he can.
Please, let us all join hands to assist the government to continue to provide the needed services for the people and the nation by paying the required taxes and just hope that no government or public service official will embezzle any money to be collected by the government.
By Rockson Adofo