Bawumia blames Covid-19, Russia-Ukraine crisis for economic woes
Bawumia mentions E-levy once in 2-hour presentation
Information Minister, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah has refuted claims that the Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia avoided commenting on the Electronic Transactions Levy (E-Levy) during a public lecture last week
He explained, over the weekend, in an interview on Citi TV’s current affairs programme, ‘The Big Issue’ that the government had used its town hall meetings on E-Levy to provide answers to questions most citizens had.
He argued that it was thus not important for the Vice President to repeat what had been explained by some key government officials during the nationwide meetings with a section of the public.
“The E-levy is a matter that I think extensively we have as a government spoken to across this country and answered every single question on.
“I can understand why some people want him to do an elaborate talk. But it should not be missed that his presentation was the third in the series of presentations by the government dealing with various issues, and we’ve dealt extensively with the E-Levy, traveling from Takoradi, Koforidua, Wa, Ho and other places engaging the public, Parliament and using mass media platforms explaining the why and dealing with the fact that those two principal issues, one that digitization will not be compromised by E-Levy, has to responded to and it has been responded to [and] the second matter that deals with the poor,” Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah said.
Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, delivered a public lecture on the economy on April 7 amid the recent economic crunch.
Ahead of the lecture, most people had wanted to hear the Vice President's position on the E-levy which had been passed on March 29 and assented to by the President two days later.
Dr. Bawumia, years ago, in an interview with Accra-based Peace FM opined that he does not believe Mobile Money should be taxed as it was going to affect the poor.
However, the Vice President in his 2-hour presentation only mentioned E-Levy once when he spoke about taxes that government had introduced.
