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Ghana’s finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, assures retirees, debt swap deal ‘good for you’

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Ghana’s finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has assured a group of protesting retiree bondholders on Monday they were being offered a good deal.

The protest follows a move by the government of the struggling West African nation that pushes to get a domestic debt exchange over the line by Tuesday.

The minister told the group of over-60s protesting the debt exchange outside the finance ministry that the five-year maturity on offer was favourable given a third of them held instruments with maturities of more than 12 years, despite an interest rate cut to 15% from an average of 18.5%.

“Look into your heart and ask whether what has been offered is so injurious versus your contribution to our economy,” Ofori-Atta told five of the protesters after a larger group had left their earlier demonstration.

“Hand on heart I feel (the deal offered) is good for you and good for the nation.”

Ghana launched a debt swap plan in December as part of attempts to address a spiraling economic crisis, but it has struggled to convince bondholders to register, in part due to a lack of clarity over its terms and concerns about profitability.

Under the current arrangement, retirees below the age of 59 are being offered a 10% coupon rate.

Reacting to the minister’s position, Adu Anane Antwi, convener of the Pensioner Bondholders Forum, said “The minister has said they want 80% (of domestic bonds to be exchanged) to become successful.”

“We think if pensioners are left out of the programme they will still get their 80%.”

Ghana is currently in a dire economic and financial situation, the country approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in July to ask for financial help after soaring prices and economic hardship spurred street protests.

It secured a staff-level agreement with the IMF in December for a $3 billion loan, but the money’s approval is contingent on it restructuring its debt of 467.4 billion cedis ($39 billion).

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Kenya, Uganda settle oil import dispute

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In an effort to patch things up between the two neighbours, Kenya will permit Uganda’s landlocked state oil company to import petroleum products through its port of Mombasa, the country’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

After decades of receiving their cargo through affiliated firms in Kenya, Uganda has been looking for alternative ways to import petroleum products, including through a port in Tanzania. According to Solomon Muyita, a spokesman for Uganda’s ministry of minerals and energy, the first shipment under the new arrangement is scheduled for May.

“Kenya has agreed to give us a licence, UNOC (Uganda National Oil Company) is now free to import through Mombasa,” he said.

According to reports, UNOC would use the Kenya Pipeline Company to transport the goods, so Kenya would still profit from the agreement, according to Kenyan Energy Minister Davis Chirchir.

In 2022, Uganda imported petroleum products valued at $1.6 billion, the majority of which came from the Gulf. Kenya serves as the import gateway for about 90% of the goods.

It declared in November that it would transfer all exclusive petroleum product supply rights to a division of the international energy trader Vitol, which would subsequently supply UNOC.

According to what the government said at the time, using Kenyan companies to import oil had “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities” whereby Ugandan retail companies were viewed as secondary whenever there were supply disruptions changing retail prices.

The two African nations that make up the Great Lakes are partners in a variety of fields, including trade, infrastructure, energy, education, agriculture, and military security.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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