2021 budget offers no hope, inspiration – Francis Sosu

Francis-Xavier Sosu, the MP for Madina Constituency has opined that the 2021 budget offers no hope for the future of the Ghanaian.

According to him, the budget delivered by Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu on Friday, March 13, 2021 will discourage young people who intend to setup their own businesses.

Sosu noted, the ‘obnoxious tax regimes’ introduced in the budget have the potential of killing businesses.

“Listening to the Budget today, I felt very ashamed and disappointed as a Ghanaian who had high hopes for the future. A National Budget in a pandemic must offer hope and inspiration. This budget does not inspire confidence for the future of the Ghanaian youth. It kills the aspirations of young businesses and seeks to further worsen the plight of the poor and vulnerable through obnoxious tax regimes,” he said in a statement issued on Friday.

He continued: “As a lawyer and a student of economic policy, who finds myself at the law making chamber, my hope and aspiration is to support programs that would deal with systemic inequality and provide hope for the youth. Obviously this budget did not provide this hope. Not for me, the people of Madina and certainly not the business community.”

The government in the budget announced new levies which it hopes will help the nation recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The levies include 1% Covid-19 health levy, sanitation and pollution levy, banking sector reform levy, gaming tax, among others.

On the health levy, the caretaker Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu explained it will “provide the requisite resources to address these challenges and fund these activities, government is proposing the introduction of a Covid-19 Health Levy of a one percentage point increase in the National Health Insurance Levy and a one percentage point increase in the VAT Flat Rate to support expenditures related to Covid-19”.

The sanitation levy will be “improving urban air quality and combat air pollution, support the re-engineering of landfill sites at Kpone and Oti, support fumigation of public spaces, schools, health centres and markets, revamp/reconstruct poorly managed landfill facilities, construct more sustainable state-of-the-art waste treatment plants both solid and liquid in selected locations across the country,”