Ghana's Center-Right Party: "NDC Lied To Ghanaians About Lowering Taxes"

The center-right opposition New Patriotic Party is accusing the Ghanaian government of worsening the plight of Ghanaians with its stringent tax policy. According to Kweku Kwarteng, the NPP's head of communications, this was not what the party promised Ghanaians in the 2008 presidential election. “The NDC [National Democratic Congress' center-left] government is a victim of its own promises. They did promise in their campaign manifesto that in the first 100 days they would carry out a comprehensive reduction of levies and tariffs so Ghanaians will have relief", he said. “In the last one year we saw a marginal reduction in petroleum taxes. There are signals in the 2010 budget that that will be reversed and now we are seeing an increase of all forms of levies and tariffs. It shows clearly that the government hasn’t been very sincere with the people of Ghana,” Mr. Kwarteng added.

Mr. Kwarteng said that there are no guarantees that the revenue generated from these levies will be channeled into productive ventures. Even more unfortunate, he stated, is government’s tendency to overspend, not on capital ventures, but purely on administration and services. Quoting figures from this year’s budget, Mr. Kwarteng said government overspent nearly 40 per cent of its administrative budget. “For administration and services we are talking about refreshment and tea and kebab people enjoy at meetings and committee work,” he said. Meanwhile, Mr. Kwarteng alleged, Ghanaians' wages went down by six per cent.

Haruna Iddrisu, the government's Communication Minister, disagrees. He explained that “government will not deliberately inflict hardships on its citizenship.” He said government had to increase road tolls largely to raise revenue to execute the better Ghana agenda for the country. According to Mr. Iddrisu, the then Kufuor-led administration to which Mr. Kwarteng belongs, took a loan of US$84 million which government had to pay through funds generated from the road funds. He said that the government’s decision to impose taxes on akpeteshie (local gin) and cigarettes was to discourage its usage because they were injurious to the human body. He also dismissed Mr. Kwarteng's claims of high administrative budget, insisting the NDC has a relatively lower expenditure as compared to the first year of the NPP administration.

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