Support GRA to save textile industry
The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has announced that effective October this year, no textile can enter the country’s markets without an excise tax stamp embossed on it.
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The authority said the tax stamp policy would cover African prints such as wax prints, fancy prints (plain dyed) and any type of materials composed of natural or artificial fibres either imported with design or woven designs.
In the view of the authority, the decision to affix tax stamps to all imported or locally produced textiles would protect the ailing textile industry from imminent collapse.
This can be achieved by first ensuring that only textiles with the tax stamps are allowed on the market.
Anything short of this renders such textiles illegal to be sold on the local market.
With this, red tax stamps are zero-rated, meaning they are exempted from paying for the tax stamps.
They will be affixed only to textiles and wax prints produced in the country.
The green tax stamps will be affixed to imported textile products, which will pay the value for the excise tax stamps, while the blue tax stamps are for goods in transit and textiles in stock before the implementation started.
The GRA and its stakeholders, including the Ministry of Trade and Industry, believe the measure would give a new lease on life to the local textile industry and help to create more jobs.
As a measure to ensure compliance with the policy, the GRA said enforcement at the points of sale would begin on January 2, next year.
The decision to implement the tax stamp policy comes almost five years after the government first took the decision to implement the intervention to curb smuggling, piracy and dumping of fake products on the local market.
On September 9, 2019, the government and stakeholders in the textile industry agreed on a roadmap for the implementation of the policy within two weeks.
The roadmap was arrived at when the Minister of Trade and Industry at the time, Alan Kyerematen, held a meeting with the stakeholders in the sector in Accra on Friday, September 6, 2019.
However, the roadmap for implementation has not been followed through, despite calls by the Textiles, Garment and Leather Workers Union (TGLEU) for its implementation.
The Daily Graphic is happy that after over five years of being put on ice, the GRA has taken a bold step to implement the tax stamp policy.
We are, however, concerned about the policy because the once vibrant textile industry is suffocating from the influx of pirated fabrics on the local market, a situation that has been aggravated by high cost of production and weak enforcement of the anti-piracy measures.
The country once had a vibrant textile industry with 16 large companies that employed some 25,000 people and accounted for 27 per cent of total manufacturing employment in 1977.
However, the industry deteriorated such that by 2005, many of the textile companies had folded up, with only four currently existing.
The Akosombo Textiles Limited (ATL), Text Styles Ghana Limited, formerly known as GTP, Volta Star Textile Limited and Printext have less than 3,000 workers in all.
It is within this context that the Daily Graphic supports the move by the GRA to enforce the tax stamp policy to help revive the textile industry.
We call on the GRA to go all out to implement this intervention and ensure that it does not become another lip service.
The Daily Graphic is aware that the task force set up in 2010 to crack down on pirated textiles products in the local markets, included personnel from the security agencies, the GRA and the Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA).
The task force was set up in compliance with the World Trade Organisation’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement, which mandates governments not to allow goods that have been infringed to enter the channel of commerce and also not to allow the re-exportation of such goods.
It is worrying that after almost 13 years, the anti-textile piracy task force has been in coma, in spite of calls by industry players for it to be active.
It is the belief of the Daily Graphic that the time is now ripe to reconstitute the task force to police the implementation to ensure its utmost success.
As has always been our contribution, the Daily Graphic will support the drive with educational information, follow-ups and pointers that will help the GRA and its partners to execute this all-important policy to perfection.
This is grounded on the fact that the textile industry and local companies will return to winning ways and create more jobs when given the needed attention.
