A Rare Moment of Tax Appreciation

For the very first time in history, Ghanaians are actually happy about the tax they are paying. Okay, maybe not all Ghanaians but most of them are. Yesterday, a friend of mine who has a car was telling me about how they’ve added this energy tax to fuel. And the main purpose of it is to help us have electricity running 24/7.

I was waiting for a complaint in the end but he was actually happy about it. He said it was cool that this thing had been put in place to help us keep our lights on all the time. “Finally, something that makes sense”, he added. I actually laughed in agreement at a point because before this particular fuel tax thing, we were paying electronic levy.

That was probably the most annoying tax I’ve ever heard in history. They said it was to let online businesses pay tax to the government since their financial transactions were done online. My problem with this particular one was that, what if I was just a student whose guardian was sending money? Do you get the point? Imagine all these market women who work so hard to make ends meet and then have to pay ridiculous taxes just to send money to their kids in school.

I don’t know if it makes any sense to you but for me, it never did. The fact that they couldn’t even see that loophole…. Oh wait, they probably saw it but didn’t even care. Right!
The other side of my problem is how up till today, there isn’t one particular thing we can boldly say it was established with the taxes gotten from electronic transactions. Not even one thing.

I also heard they allocated so much funds to build a national cathedral for the country. Hmm!

As I said in the beginning, my friend is happily paying the taxes imposed on fuel because now, we have electricity 24/7. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve always had electricity but then they were always doing maintenance. Always.
It felt like using a remote with faulty batteries and instead of changing the batteries, you just choose to be slapping it all the time.

Now, we’re no more slapping the remote. We have changed the batteries. (That sounded so fun to say). But anyway, I’m kind of happy that for first time, taxes are actually being used for what they are supposed to be used for. If only we keep up with this attitude, we’ll get to our destination faster than we expect.