The Chief Executive Office (CEO) of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications has clarified that his outfit has not gotten enough data to ascertain the claims made in some news report that there have been panic withdrawals since the E-levy bill was pass last week.
Last week the Parliament of Ghana passed the Electronic Transaction bill, known as E-levy. A day after the President of Ghana signed the bill into law and shall be implemented soon.
Finance Minister Ken Ofori is anticipating that the E-lvy shall soon be implemented by May, 2022.
According to some stories, mobile money vendors are complaining on panic withdrawals and how this will affect their business. Yet, Mr Ken Ashigbey has stated that the Chamber of Telecommunications does not have enough data to support this claim.
He said: “You would want to collect data over a certain period. The interesting thing is that if you look at even the Bank of Ghana data that they have reported, it showed some decline. But you also would want to find out whether there are any cyclical trends by comparing with prior years and then also as a social scientist you want to really look at the context and be sure that when you say it is the announcement you actually can pin it that, that is the effect of the announcement”.
The CEO added that in about 2 weeks they should be able to gather enough data to make any causative link between the passage of the bill and the current happenings. In addition, what happened in other jurisdiction could be happening in the country but then they will need some time to be able to make any definite statement on the matter.
By this he added that: “But it is also not surprising, you know that the sensitivities of markets you know when some announcements are made, people can respond in various means. So, that could be happening but before you can make a definite statement on that you would have to check that and I am also sure that we all know the elasticity of demand…. And then you also know historically from what had happened in other markets that this has been the trends, but then what you want to do to be able to make such a definite statement is to actually gather the data and analyse it before you can come up to any causative between the announcement or the passing of the bill and actually what is been seen in the market.
Even though government is hoping the bill will be implemented in May, Mr Ashigbey believe the complexity of the bill will determine how soon this will happen.
Speaking on Citi Business Show this morning in an interview with Bernard Avle, he concluded that: “As engineers and technical people it will depend on the complexity of what it is that we have to implement. Because there will have to be changes made to our member’s systems and we know that GRA themselves were getting some technical partners to be able to work on the whole issue of this hundred cedis exemption that is there. Because there should be a common platform that will clear that. And then there will the compliant side, the system has to make sure that we are complying to that. Those are portions that the GRA themselves were building. But all of that, the scope of that could change based on what is passed by Parliament. I am not too sure because I don’t have the details, I can speak whether one month will be enough time for all of those systems. But from our side we will do what is possible.
