Features

The 2018 Mid-Year review proposed an additional 35 per cent top marginal rate for taxpayers under the Personal Income Tax (PIT) regime. While this has become the main attraction, we note that the bill to amend the Income Tax Act, 2018 (Act 896) repeats an important downward adjustment in the five per cent and 10 per cent brackets, which took effect with the 2018 budget itself (see table 1).

It is necessary to note that PIT is paid by (a) employees on salaries and allowances; and by self-employed persons and partners on profits. In essence, the PIT paid is a non-corporate business tax from the perspective of these latter two taxpayers.

Whilst the proposed new 35 per cent top marginal rate makes the new PIT appear progressive—as is also the case with the increase in personal exempt threshold from GH¢2,592 to GH¢3,132—it is important to take note of the regressive nature of the downward adjustment for low-income

The Government of Ghana has outlined a bold vision to make Ghana a hub for refined petroleum products in West Africa. The hub will be built in three phases over a 13-year period starting from 2018 and completed by 2030. It is anticipated that the petroleum hub will be built in the Western Region of Ghana at a location that can hold the planned infrastructure and activities estimated to cover 20,000 acres.

The hub is to house four refineries with a total capacity of 600,000 barrels per stream day (bpsd). The hub will ultimately hold and redistribute 50 per cent of the West African consumption of petroleum products which is about 30 million MT per annum. The hub, when completed, will have storage infrastructure, port facility with multiple berths, refineries, petrochemical plants and an industrial park with related facilities such as school, hospital, roads, pipelines and rail network.

The hub is a strategic anchor initiative which will grow Ghana’s gross domes

Ghana recently experienced two overnight bank collapse and a third bank currently under official administration by KPMG. Such scandals have been prevalent in advanced nations but have largely remained unknown to developing economies until their recent occurrence in Ghana.

An African proverb says ‘if you close your eyes to facts, you will learn through accidents,’ which means if we close our eyes or keep quiet about the deep seated challenges that have bedevilled our corporate landscape by brushing them aside, one day we will learn the hard way’ has been enacted before our very eyes.

The demise of our banks could be attributed to a gamut of issues. Though the regulator, Bank of Ghana, asserted that weak economic growth, poor corporate governance and risk management practices were responsible for the demise of the banks, I believe there were other causes that led to the collapse of the banks.

The Harvard University conducted a research into the personal planning habits of a selected group of its graduates. They came up with some interesting statistics: 27 per cent of them had no plan for the future; 60 per cent had given it some thought but mainly in the area of finance; 10 per cent had a fairly good idea of their future plans and aspirations; only the last three per cent had clear, written goals about their future. Not surprisingly, it was these people who went on to become the most successful of the lot in the long run.

A plan is a proposed or intended course of action. It is a formulated scheme setting out stages of procedures. Whereas a person’s goal defines the desired end or destination, the plan maps out the route to that end. To fail to plan is to plan to fail. Without a plan, one may have a clear goal and yet use wrong strategies or approaches and end up unsuccessful.

This is the first in a series of articles I’ll be writing about Invest in Africa (IIA), an organisation that’s founded on a vision to build thriving economies in Africa through a different model of doing business. As IIA Ambassador, I’ve seen its impact on the growth of SME’s that have benefited from their work. But beyond all the talk of profits, turn over, growth and other jargon, its the potential to create vast business and employment opportunities to turbocharge African economies that excites me.

Imagine what could happen if big businesses decided to bring growth to the economy by helping smaller businesses grow.

A couple of multinationals in Ghana did actually choose to do this. They created the IIA, a not-for-profit organisation to drive their vision to see strong, thriving economies in Africa.

Access to markets
They realised by using local suppliers, their big pocket books would be bringing growth and new jobs to smalle

This article was first published in May last year when the Atomic Fire Disaster occured.

Last Saturday’s gas explosion at the Atomic junction near Madina, Accra, is just one of the numerous incidents of gas explosions gutting the country, at least in the past three years. Similarly, the Daily Graphic in its October 6, 2017 issue carried a story about the death of some four persons resulting from a gas explosion in a hotel kitchen in Accra a few days before the Atomic Junction incident.

The GRAPHIC story further catalogued a litany of gas explosions across the country having ‘claimed many lives leaving experts to attribute the phenomenon to the failure by institutions to put in safety measures to prevent such disasters. Mention was made of the death of one person in May this year, with 5 others injured, as a result of a gas explosion at a welding shop at Lamashegu near Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana. The explosion in June this year, at a fuel p

Leading with purpose is important to unlocking higher levels of motivation and commitment that leaders complain is lacking in their teams. Research on organisational effectiveness suggests that the lack of leadership purpose is one of the main reasons for underperformance in many organisations. Defining your leadership purpose is so critical to leadership effectiveness. Unfortunately many leaders get to work every day busy and so neglect to answer the question: What’s the purpose?  Many leaders say the purpose of their leadership is to “get results”. This leads to the question; what results and for whom? Some say they want to “create change.”.The question then is; what change and in whose interest?

What is the purpose for leading your team?
A team leader’s purpose goes beyond achieving targets and tasks set out for the team. As a leader, you have responsibility in many ways than one. You are responsible for each individual team member’s performance,

No man should start building a house without factoring in contingencies’ - Author

In recent times, reports of buildings collapsing during construction have been in the media thus generating some worries. The Daily Graphic carried a story in its Wednesday June 7, 2017 issue, regarding the collapse of a warehouse under construction in Accra. Two persons were reported to have been killed in this tragedy while another got severely injured.

A similar incident was reported to have occurred in Techiman in the Brong Ahafo Region where at least one person was killed with the lucky ones suffering various degrees of injuries. The purpose for this write-up is to have a closer look at what building contractors can do to manage these risks.

This is the concluding part of the presentation by Rev. Albert Ocran at the Global Convocation of the Springboard 2018 Road Show on the theme: “Leveraging Strategy and Technology.”

Strategy varies from person to person and from situation to situation. It is scary that what works in a particular situation could fail abysmally if repeated in a similar situation with almost the same variables.

It was clear that the Greeks had achieved success several times using first dialogue; and if persuasion failed, all out war. This time around, the same approach totally failed, hence the need for change. Isn't it amazing that what force could not achieve in 10 years was accomplished with a simple strategy of concealment and a relevant technology designed and constructed in three days?

‘It is not for nothing that even the Bible states that the love for money is the root of all evils’.

In the past few weeks, perhaps the biggest news and of particular concern of any risk-conscious institution was the one involving the murder of an expatriate who was said to have been carrying a huge sum of money in his car from the bank to his place of work. The incident was so bizarre, discussing it did not easily get drowned in the midst of many other cases of robbery during that week!

This week’s write-up would be limited to the implications for carrying cash from one point to another, particularly using vehicles.