Senior Presidential Advisor, Yaw Osafo-Maafo is unhappy with the amount of money Ghana generates from property rates.
According to him, property rates accrues only 0.03% to Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), saying it does not auger well for the country.
Osafo-Maafo said some West African countries, including The Gambia, generate a lot of money from property rates.
Speaking at the swearing-in of the new governing board of the Local Government Service in Accra, Osafo-Maafo urged the board to come up with innovative ways to retrieve property rates from citizens.
“In Ghana, we only realise 0.03% of GDP from property rates. To put it better into perspective, The Gambia generates revenue from property rates about 17 times more than what we do in Ghana.”
Recently, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor, disclosed that the government is in the process of rolling out a new policy on property rates so that appropriate rates would be charged on every structure.
Mr. Jinapor said the process required multi-sectoral efforts and that his Ministry would collaborate with the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to promulgate a legislative instrument that would ensure that land is considered a vital ingredient in evaluating the value of any property in the country.
The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, explained that the legislative instrument and policy on property rates will ensure equity in property valuation.
The Minister said the non-inclusion of land in the valuation of structures or buildings is unfair and cannot be allowed to continue.
“You value the property based on the structure and not the value of the land. So the value of the land is completely discounted, and it doesn’t get into the valuation, and the government thinks that is very inequitable and very unfair.”
“So I am in the process of triggering the mandate of the Minister for Local Government and Regional Reorganisation to have the legal mandate to promulgate a Legislative Instrument which will get lands as a factor of valuation.”
