Govt will improve revenue collection to cover shortfalls in tax reliefs

The Minister of Finance, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, has stated that the country will make up for the shortfalls in tax reliefs by ensuring efficiency in revenue collection, especially by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

The Chief Executive Officer of Reroy Cables, Kate Quartey-Papafio, has said in as much as industry has a role to play in creating more jobs and producing more goods to grow the economy, government must also implement the needed policies that will secure their investments.

"We can produce but look at us; we have the silos; our silos are still sitting there. What plans do we have in terms of storage and making sure that when we produce we can store and then export?" she asked.

"Even with the one-district one-factory, when we are somewhere in Bogoso, and we finish our production, how can we get it down to Accra? What about our railway system, how can we get our products outside the country by exporting them?" she questioned.

"Are we looking at how that after all the hard work we have put in, we can get our products straight to the port without any hindrance?" she asked, saying these are the areas government needs to look at.

Mrs. Quartey-Papafio was speaking at the maiden edition of the National Policy Submit (NPS) ongoing in Accra.

More often than not, she argued, a lot is said about policies whilst little attention is paid to their effective implementation, which is key to protecting the investements of private sector players.

"How can we sustain it and make sure that our investments are secure?"

Mrs. Quartey-Papafio also had an issue with the kind of graduates that are churned out from the various technical schools, saying technical school graduates must focus on the practical aspect of their respective programmes.

"Our economy is such that the people that we have need to be trained in critical areas. So, what policy is government implementing for technical schools so that they will not focus on theories but practical?"

Graduates of technical schools, she insisted, must have technical expertise and should be able to work and produce results and not only be good at rehearsing theories and unable to handle industrial machines.

The government admits technical educational institutions need retooling to enable them train the right calibre of personnel for industry.

President Akufo-Addo, over the weekend, in the Volta Region, reiterated the commitment of his government to prioritise technical education, as it holds the key to the country's industrial development.

He said all the countries in the world that used to be like Ghana, but are now places of prosperity and development, became so because they paid a great deal of attention and committed a lot of resources to the development of their educational system, especially the development of their technical and scientific education.

Source: Reroy Cable (reroycable.com).