Former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings says government is taking too much and too high taxes and that is killing the private sector and discouraging further investments in the country. 

She also accused the Mahama government of using the taxes to balance their budget instead of using it to develop the country. She thinks it is not fair to the people.

Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings was speaking at an Awards ceremony organized by the Private Investors Protection Agency (PIPA) to honour Dr. Maurice Ampaw for his immense contribution to media discussions during the Presidential Petition hearing at the Supreme Court last year.

PIPA thinks Maurice Ampaw enriched the discussion about the technicalities of the Supreme Court case and helped the public, both literate and illiterate to understand the court proceedings every step of the way. 

Nana Konadu was the Guest Speaker at the Awards, and she asked “why have they increase the VAT - man is dying already - why are you pushing us into the grave - wait for us to die before you burry us.”

It would be recalled that recently the government increase VAT (value added tax) from 15% to 17.5%. Prior to that it had increased taxes on several products and services, and had placed taxes and duties on items that used to be tax free.

Recently the government withdrew taxes on condoms because it found ridiculous. And critics of the government has accused it of being lazy for increasing taxes and placing taxes on certain items without thinking out of the box.

The government also hinted in its 2014 budget that it is considering roping faith-based bodies into the tax net, a move which has been widely criticized by the Christian community. 

Nana Konadu argued that ‘no country’ in the world ran their economy on taxes and no government in the world uses taxes to balance their budget at the detriment of the masses.

She said the more the government increases tax burden, the more the people lose their purchasing power and the economy would eventually run into problems.

Nana Konadu Agyemang said most countries that want to grow, rather reduce taxes to encourage investments and increased purchasing power, unlike what is happening in Ghana right now.

She is therefore challenging the government to study the tax systems of various countries around the world and select a system that would best suit the Ghanaian situation, instead of just piling on taxes anytime government needs money.

“Government must re-orient the economy to be people-centered instead of this tax-centered orientation,” she said.

Nana Konadu also noted that the current Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does not reflect on the lifestyle of Ghanaians because most of the indicators are just paper work but not real.

She said: “GDP alone does not give us the exact fate in which a people live. It doesn’t tell us how we are living at all, it doesn’t tell us our comfort or our difficulties, it doesn’t tell us anything at all and yet they use that as the basis to say we are middle income,” she said.

The former first lady told the gathering “maybe you guys here are middle income level [but] go out there and see the mess okay, so if we say GDP is at a certain level, I’m saying that alone does not give us the exact fate in which Ghanaians are living. Also I can comfortably say that GDP does not always translate into a good or a better life of the people, it doesn’t at all,” she argued.