General News of Friday, 1 July 2022
Source: www.ghanaweb.live
2022-07-01Cancel E-Levy if you are going to the IMF - Ablakwa urges government
MP for North Tongu, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa
Govt gave Ghanaians a choice between E-Levy and IMF, Ablakwa
IMF will stop Akufo-Addo from hiring luxury jets, Ablakwa
Accept E-Levy or we go back to IMF, Ken Ofori-Atta
Member of Parliament (MP) for North Tongu, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has called on the government to cancel the Electronic Transfer Levy
Read full article(E-Levy) if it has decided to go to the International Monetary Fund, IMF, for a bailout.
According to the parliamentarian, the government during discussions on the E-Levy gave Ghanaians the choice of either accepting the levy or going back to the IMF for financial assistance which it said will come with a cost.
“You gave Ghanaians two options: E-Levy or IMF. Having opted for the IMF, any honest government will scrap the unconstitutional and repugnant E-Levy immediately,” a tweet shared by the MP on July 1, 2022, read.
In another tweet, the MP said that going into an IMF programme will at least stop President Nana Addo Akufo-Addo from hiring luxurious private jets.
“Perhaps the only positive outcome of an IMF bailout is that they wouldn’t allow Prez Akufo-Addo to obstinately continue with his insensitive, wasteful, oligarchic €20,000 an hour chartered luxury jet travels which have cost the suffering taxpayer over GHS34million in 13 months,” he said.
Speaking at a government’s town-hall meeting to discuss the E-levy on Thursday, 27 January 2022, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said that the passage of the E-levy will save the country from falling back on the IMF for financial assistance, which, he said, would be disastrous.
“When we were in the IMF programme, we couldn’t pay for nurses and teachers… we couldn’t hire anymore because there were restrictions on that. I mean, it’s just really thinking you can go back to Egypt.
“So, we can deal with them for them to give us advice but we need not ever get into an IMF programme [again]. If we don’t do this E-levy, we’re just pushing ourselves in a way that would potentially end up in such a disaster,” Ofori-Atta said.
Meanwhile, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has ordered the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, to commence official engagements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In a statement issued by the Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah on Friday, July 1, 2022 the finance minister was instructed by the president to seek IMF’s support for an economic programme put together by the government of Ghana.
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