The District Chief Executive Officer for Pusiga, Zubeiru Abdulai, is worried about the district’s inability to raise enough revenues.
According to the DCE, the district assembly’s revenue mobilisation drive hit a snag after neighbouring countries, Togo and Burkina Faso, experienced some political and security instability.
Mr. Abdulai said this when he spoke to Mark Smith on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
“If you know my district, you would know we share a border with Togo, and we know what happened in Togo. We share a border with Burkina Faso too, and the situation there was very serious. Bawku, you know what is happening in Bawku. These have affected economic activities in those areas. That is the challenge.”
“Where we used to get our IGF more was the border between Pusiga and Burkina Faso; that is the Kulungugu border. Because of the happenings in Burkina Faso now, most of the vehicles don’t feel safe passing through our place, and it has affected our IGF very greatly,” he said.
According to the DCE, the district has only market tolls along with some other basic levies to serve as IGF, amounts he described as woefully inadequate to attend to all the needs of the area, stressing that, “our revenue collection has been seriously affected.”
The situation, according to Mr. Abdulai, may be saved by the government’s decision to, through the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), collect property taxes on structures within the various MMDAs.
“Yesterday, they were in my district to train and assist them in collecting those property rates,” he said.
The DCE called on the government to reconsider the constitution’s math on the distribution of the District Assembly’s Common Fund. Mr. Abdulai explained that it would help if the districts with very limited revenue mobilisation opportunities were given bigger allocations.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
