As one of our ex presidents said ‘y3te sika so, nanso 3kom de yen’ which directly translates into we are sitting on money but we are hungry. This has been the situation in Ghana for as long as I can remember. There’s so much money in the system yet the average citizen is suffering.
Ghana is known to be one of the countries rich in natural resources and many more. Yet we are not able to make use of our natural resources. What do we do? We give outsiders the chance to come into our country to exploit our resources and take it back to their country, bring it back to our country again and give it back to us at exorbitant prices. This in turn also affects the economy here.
Everyone in Ghana pays taxes on the daily basis and most of them don’t even know they pay taxes. Today, anything you buy has at least 20% tax on it. And all this money goes to the government. But we don’t see any sort of development on our country, Ghana. Aside taxes on goods in the country, workers also pay taxes with the Ghana revenue authority and it’s a lot of money at the end of the day. Just recently, I visited the Ghana revenue authority to file for my tax returns and the amount of money I had to pay for a company that hasn’t even started making profit yet was alarming.
After making enquiries about how the taxing system worked, I was told by the officer in charge that they had to first access the company, check out our facility before they can tax the company. Then, they would now tax the directors of the company also. I now told the officer that the company was just starting with its operations and she told me then they’d have to make us pay taxes for only the first quarter of the year. I asked for the amount to be payed and I almost collapsed, infact I collapsed. But after I woke up I still payed my taxes and went hack home with no money to even go into business with. This is one problem most startups in Ghana face. By the time you’re done paying taxes, there will be nothing left to even run your business.
Speaking about development and infrastructure, I’m not seeing the impact of the taxes being payed by the people I’m our country. Our roads are full of potholes, our healthcare system is a mess, our educational system is nothing to speak home about. We claim to have implemented free education yet our students don’t even have food to eat in their various senior high schools. Meanwhile, funds have been allocated for all of these things to run smoothly.
So the big question is, where is the money going? When we speak of corruption, it’s clear as day that our leaders are very corrupt and are stealing for their own country on the daily basis. I’d like to believe that because the government has has not proven to be who they claim to be , the people have also just decided to leave them. However, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s our hard earned money we are leaving to be stolen by people who haven’t worked for it, so I think we the citizens should be able to hold the government accountable our their taxes. That’s the only way our country is going to develop if we wish for development.
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I think Nigeria's case is even worse, we don't see a single thing our tax money is spent on.
Calm down o
Go and sleep
🤣🤣
It’s true.
Pay tax pay tax, after doing so, it goes to the coffers of some officials. No dividend of tax is seen anywhere.
Imagine start up companies paying huge amount of tax, how then would they survive in business? It's unfortunate what we go through in Africa.
!BBH
It’s sad. But we have to find a way through it.
This part got me laughing, but it's sad what we go through in the hands of these African president, because it's same situation over here in Nigeria
Ghana and Nigeria are like brothers in this thing. We just hope for the best.😅