As part of the policy changes planned by the government under the 2022 Budget, road tolls in Ghana were abolished in November 2021.
But now the administration has brought it back. As one of the income initiatives in the 2023 budget that was tabled to Parliament to raise money for Ghana’s needs, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta announced the reinstatement. According to Kwaku Sintim-Misa, this action by the government merely serves as evidence that the authorities are disjointed and unaware of what they are doing.
“So, basically, I thought that the whole thing was muddled with confusion. Number one, it shouldn’t have been canceled at all; number two, they just decided to bring it back. Why are you bringing it back?” he said.
KSM said that a thorough justification for the government’s decision to reinstate road tolls should be provided in an interview with GhanaWeb. “Are you bringing it back because you made a mistake canceling it in the first place? So just address Ghanaian people and tell us, ‘Listen, Ghanaian people, it was an error canceling this thing, we made a mistake and are trying to reverse it. We’re going to bring it back and when we bring it back we are going to make it more digital, we are going to do this, we are going to do that, to improve it,” KSM said.
KSM fuerher lambasted the government for initially cancelling of the road tolls. “To cancel paying road tolls in Ghana, I thought it was very unfortunate, especially if you’re going to use the road tolls to actually help improve the state of roads, then you need to collect road tolls even if Ghanaians will not understand the importance of road tolls. This is where you can come out and state clearly that we need to improve our road tolls. We need a road coming from Accra to Kumasi, these things don’t just happen,” he said.
“They come from the tolls that we pay. Even if they thought that road tolls were not as effective and it was not collecting as much, then we need to sit down and actually come up with a strategy of how best we can get the road tolls to work. Because there is no question in my mind that they (road tolls) are needed, especially in a country that is economically harder with raising revenue,” KSM emphasized.
