The Speaker, Rt. Hon. Alban S.K. Bagbin, promptly disregarded a last-ditch attempt by the majority leader in Parliament to claim some of the credit for the introduction and success of the Value Added Tax (VAT) for himself.
After the minority leader questioned the position of the ruling party on the tax instrument in 1995 and today, Mr. Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu asked his colleagues to go and verify his contribution to the VAT debate in Parliamentary Hansard.
However, when it was pointed out that Hon. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu was not even a member of Parliament in 1995, when discussions on VAT first started, Speaker of the House Rt. Hon. Alban S.K. Bagbin intervened and swiftly ended the debate.
On Friday, November 26 in Ho, Volta Region, during the opening ceremony of a workshop on the government’s 2023 Budget Statement and Economic Policy, the “VAT row” broke out.
Minority leader Haruna Iddrisu was amazed at how the New Patriotic Party (NPP), then in opposition 23 years ago, distorted the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government’s implementation of VAT and is now unafraid to raise it despite the country’s current economic problems.
How I wish we could go back to 1995, when the opposition at the time saw nothing good in the NDC. At least now, there is some good in the NDC.
“The best tax tool for Ghana continues to be the VAT, a tax instrument that generates GH15 billion yearly and was the thinking and thought of the party you so-thought could not make any real contribution to our national development endeavor.”
However, Hon. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu responded with his own account of what happened and expressed surprise at how his colleague decided to disregard his VAT contributions.
“I am amazed that most of the time, when people talk about the resistance to VAT, they don’t even mention what I stated in Parliament at the time,” he remarked.
“Go read what I said as it is recorded in the Hansard,” he commanded. Backbencher at the time, I suggested that we connect it to the situation in Nigeria.
Nigeria had initially implemented it at a very low rate of 7.5%, then two years later, after enlisting the support of numerous enterprises, they raised it from 7.5%.
He said, “If you don’t recall this, it’s selective amnesia.”
The longest-serving member of the House and present when VAT was proposed in Parliament, Speaker Alban Bagbin, intervened and put an end to the situation.
He emphasized that Mr. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu had only recently joined the House of Representatives and that the alleged remarks were made in 1996.
However, he emphasized that the VAT discussion began in 1995.
Some of us in the government at the time, he said, “did not support the VAT.” A organization we had was named the Devil’s Advocates. Kwesi Kedem and I shared a membership. Clem Sowu participated actively.
“You will be surprised if we all start saying what we said in Parliament those days,” he continued.