…NPP MP Blackmails Illiterate Constituents
The Akufo-Addo government’s campaign to have the obnoxious Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy) accepted by Ghanaians has degenerated into open blackmail of Ghanaians.
A Member of Parliament belonging to the ruling party NPP, Michael Okyere Baafi, has been seen in viral videos telling his constituents that if the e-levy is not passed, the government will be constrained to cancel the Free Senior High School program.
According to Mr. Baafi, who is the MP for Juabeng South in the Ashanti Region which is the stronghold of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), it is the World Bank and the IMF which will force Akufo-Addo to scrap the free SHS because, without the e-levy, the government will be forced to go to the Bretton Wood institutions for loans.
“One thing we have not said is that if we don’t pay the e-levy and we go to the World Bank or IMF for a loan, immediately we go they will tell Akufo-Addo to cancel Free Senior High School. This will mean all your children who have completed school (JHS) and want to go to SHS cannot go,” Mr. Baafi told a group of illiterate market women.
As the MP deviously inflicted the blackmail on the people, the impressionable market women were seen looking forlorn with some even claiming that the e-levy is good.
But the MP’s claims are desperate lies because neither the IMF nor the World Bank is against the Free SHS program, as both institutions welcomed it even though the Akufo-Addo government had haphazardly rolled it out.
Besides, the IMF has lent Ghana US$2billion to keep funding the Free SHS.
Also, the Akufo-Addo government had originally funded Free SHS with money from Ghana’s oil until 2019, when the government had dubiously claimed that it had removed the funding of the Free SHS from the Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA).
Dr. Steve Manteaw of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) which serves as a watchdog on the application of the oil money has since said that as far as he was concerned, the Free SHS is being funded with ABFA.
Last year Finance Minister said the Free SHS would cost the country Ghc7.65billion in the next five years.
“I plead with you, I am a member of parliament and in parliament, the NDC MPs they are encouraging us secretly to pass the e-levy but say that they cannot publicly support it because of politics,” Baafi said.
The E-Levy that the government is now blackmailing people with has been described as a thievish tax by which the Akufo-Addo government, which has borrowed Ghana into a debt abyss, will have the leeway to tax savings and capital.
If it is passed, the government will deduct 1.75% supposedly revised down to 1.5% of a person’s money immediately that person transfers funds from his account be it a bank account or a Mobile Money (MoMo) wallet.
This taxation of savings vandalizes a fundamental principle in taxation that says that you can only tax profit or income, not savings.