The concessional loan of €82.5-million by the European Investment Bank (EIB) to strengthen healthcare, provide specialist medical equipment and medicines across Ghana under the National COVID-19 Health Response Plan is one of the leading stories in the Ghanaian press on Tuesday.
The Graphic reports that the European Investment Bank (EIB) has provided Ghana with an €82.5-million concessional loan to strengthen health care, provide specialist medical equipment and medicines across Ghana under the National COVID-19 Health Response Plan.
Under the concessional package, the funding comprises €75 million from the EIB and a €7.5 million grant from the European Union (EU) Commission.
An agreement to that effect was signed at the EIB Headquarters in Luxembourg during President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s one-day official visit to the landlocked Western European country.
The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Mr Kwaku Ampratwum-Sarpong, signed for Ghana, while the Vice-President of the EIB, Mr Ambroise Fayolle, initialled for the bank.
The new agreement with Ghana represents the largest national EIB financing for COVID-19-related health investment in sub-Saharan Africa.
President Akufo-Addo said a strengthened cooperation between Africa and multilateral development partners was crucial to share global best practices and ensure a rapid response to health, social and health challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
He noted that the EIB and the EU were key partners for Ghana and, therefore, welcomed their support for the National COVID-19 Health Response Plan.
“Ghanaian and EIB experts have worked tirelessly in recent months to finalise this initiative since President Werner Hoyer and I met earlier this year. Specialist healthcare and medical services will benefit from both the EIB’s largest backing for COVID-19 health resilience in Africa and the EU grant support,” he added.
The newspaper says that the Ministry of Finance has refuted allegations that a private company has been awarded a contract to collect the proposed Electronic levy (E-levy) on Mobile Money transactions, inward remittances and ATM withdrawals.
Instead, the Finance Ministry in a statement issued yesterday said the Ghana Revenue Authority is the state agency mandated to collect the levy at a cost that shall not exceed the standard cost of revenue mobilization.
The Ministry’s statement was in reaction to publications that suggested that a private company has been awarded a contract to collect the E-Levy.
“The attention of the Ministry of Finance has been drawn to social media publications claiming that government has dropped the allocation of GHC241,933,000 for the E Transaction Levy Services in the 2022 Budget and it will, therefore, not appear in the Appropriations Bill,” the statement said.
“Additionally, the Ministry is aware of allegations making the rounds that a private company has been awarded a contract to collect the E-Levy. Another allegation is that the services of the said private company have now been abrogated.
“The Ministry of Finance wish to state that these allegations are all untrue.
“The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) is the state agency mandated to provide for the collection services, the cost of which shall not exceed the standard of revenue mobilization as has always been the practice. This standard indicative cost is what is outlined in the budget. GRA will manage all discussions to ensure full deployment of their current platforms and resources for the collection of the E-Levy”.
The Ghanaian Times reports that seven cases of the Omicron variant have been established within the Ghanaian population, taking the total number of positive cases in the country to 41.
The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, speaking in a media interview on Sunday said the variant was detected after testing and sequencing of samples was conducted in 66 communities.
“The first 34 cases were from the Airport. At the time, we sequenced samples from about 66 communities and all came out negative, but, in the second batch of tests, we have detected seven more cases,” he said.
Failing to give specific areas where community spread was identified, the DG noted, however, that, the Delta variant of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) still led infection rates in the country.
Dr Kuma-Aboagye said it was in view of transmissibility of emerging variants that the Service was intensifying its vaccination campaign against COVID-19 this month to achieve herd immunity.
“240 cases of COV1D-19 were recorded in November this year compared to 168, same time last year and we now have an average of 20 positive cases a day. Meanwhile, almost 75 per cent of persons who tested positive at the Airport were unvaccinated and we need to be more cautious and proactive so that we don’t have a cascade of cases come January.”
The Director-General said about 6.5 million people have so far been vaccinated out of the targeted 20 million of the population projected by the end of the year.
The newspaper says that mining companies must take strategic advantage of the price boom and by extension increased margins from last year and this year to invest in modern infrastructure and expand existing ones, General Secretary of the Ghana Mine Workers’ Union, Abdul-Moomin Gbana, has said.
Speaking at a ceremony to review the activities of the Union’s second half of 2021 in Accra yesterday, he also stressed that mining companies should take advantage of the increase in gold prices to increase production and intensify exploration activities.
“This, we believe is a substantial step towards the creation of decent and sustainable jobs and a strategic approach to sustaining the industry,” he said.
Mr Gbana said unlike other sectors which had been heavily hit since the outbreak of the pandemic, the global gold industry and by extension the mining industry so far stood out as the utmost beneficiary of this global health crisis.
“Gold since the beginning of last year has seen an unprecedented break-through in its price as it soared above two thousand US dollars an ounce (US$2,000/oz) towards the tail end of last year and has maintained relative stability since the beginning of this year. The World Gold Council has posited that Gold has been on a generally positive trend for the past few years,” he said.
He said the Union was excited about the government’s plan in the 2022 budget to increase the presence of wholly owned Ghanaian companies in the large-scale to mid-tier areas of the mining sub-sector.
Mr Gbana further indicated that the Union was impressed about the government’s plan to introduce the Minerals Income Investment Fund Small Scale Mining Incubation Programme with an allocated budget of GH₵354 million to help transform wholly-owned Ghanaian Small Scale Mining companies into mid-tier to large-scale companies over a period of 24 months beginning February, 1 2022 with up to 30 per cent of the allocation earmarked for provision of equity capital to selected small scale mining companies.
He suggested that stability agreements and special giveaways that were extended to multinational mining companies should give to the Small-Scale Mining companies to make them sustainable.
GIK/APA