The Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC) Ghana has warned of the dire financials straits that Ghanaians would be trapped in should the Finance Minister follow through with his plan to raise revenues from the petroleum sector should the Electronic Transaction Levy (E-levy) fail.
Asked what the alternative is, in the event the E-levy fails, while speaking to journalists at a function in Accra on Friday, February 18, he said: “There are always many altematives but really, you are looking at the future and you are looking at ways we can solve the issue of the increased revenue and everybody participating.
The challenge is for example, assuming you earn a million cedis a year and you transfer all of that through MoMo. What am I asking of you? $15,000. Is that what you have been fighting against? Or if you are a student and assuming your earn 100,000 cedis, which is unlikely, that means what, a 1500 cedis.
“So you then begin to ask the question, what is it that we are fighting against? And if I have also said the first hundred cedis will not be a part of it which means 3000 monthly income.
“The alternatives are many, you can go into petroleum, but is that really what you want? The mood of the country is different from the arithmetic in Parliament and that is why I have gone around.”
Sampson Addae, the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at COPEC has however cautioned the government against harbouring such an idea explaining that the consequences of same could be disastrous.
“I think that is unfair [to Ghanaians] and that would not be sensitive to the plight of Ghanaians. [This is] because, we are already complaining, The fuel price increment has brought a lot of hardship. Ghanaians are complaining about the hardships and so if government is not doing anything about it, why then turn to impose more taxes on the price of fuel to even escalate the prices higher than we are just buying now,” he explained.
Mr. Addae insisted that “government should rather find an alternative rather than taxing the petroleum sector. There are already too may taxes on fuel and adding more will mean that Ghanaians will have to go through serious hardship”.
Meanwhile, COPEC has projected that in the coming weeks, Ghanaians could buy fuel at the pumps at Ghc9.00.
This, COPEC says is highly dependent on the escalation or otherwise de-escalation of the brewing tension between Ukraine and its neighbour, Russia.
A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
