Today is first October and instead of workers in this Country being euphoric about yet another new month, workers in this Country are rather caught up in a deep mood of anxiety and are busy trying to compute the impact of the upwards adjustments in utility tarrifs on their meagre salaries.
PURC announced an upwards adjustment of Electricity tarrif to 5.94% and Water to 2.22% effective today.
And oh, there is also an upward review of the telecom services tax by about 9% which is also going to increase our call and data expenditures by about 15%.
If you look at the variables for computing water tarrifs by PURC, electricity cost is an integral component.
Now Ghanaians are going to pay more for electricity with the 5.24% upwards review of electricity tarrifs, due to the same review, they will have to pay more for water.
If this is not double taxation then I don’t know what it is.
This is serious indication that Government’s fiscal reforms since 2017 has been nothing but a sham.
By October 2019, Well over 30 months after the introduction of some rigorous tax reforms geared towards streamlining our tax regime to ease the pressure of taxes on the citizens and businesses, we have NOT seen a single impact of such reforms except for the frequent increment in utility tarrifs, a sharp contrast of what we were promised by the Vice President Dr.Bawumiah( as head of the EMT)
We are definitely in for a final quarter of extreme hardship and we must brace ourselves else we perish, this is certainly NOT what we envisaged when we trooped to various polling centers at dawn to vote for President Akufo Addo and Dr.Bawumiah in December 2016.
Election indeed has consequences!
Mensah Thompson
Executive Director
ASEPA
0542120628
