The Ghana Publishers Association (GPA) has announced a 40 percent increment on all books effective in June 2024.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the Association’s President, Asare Konadu Yamoah said the increase is due to the imposition of Value Added Tax (VAT) on imported books as well as other government policies that negatively affect the businesses of its members.
He, therefore, urged the Ministry of Finance and the Ghana Revenue Authority to engage the association as they have some proposals for consideration.
“We have innovative and progressive measures that will improve the business environment in the industry and potentially make Ghana the printing hub of West Africa. If we are all thinking about Ghana, then dialogue and consultations would have to be the anchor of the government’s relationship with businesses.
“Until such conversation is initiated, we have no options but to increase the prices of books. Starting from June, prices will go up between 30 to 40 %. This decision was not easy to make considering the difficult challenges businesses and the citizens are faced with,” he said.
He further appealed, “We therefore seek the understanding of Ghanaians as we have to protect our businesses from collapse.”
Mr Yamoah also spoke about their inability to trust the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) as an independent transparent regulator.
He therefore demanded that the book assessment and approval role granted NaCCA be withdrawn.
“Parliament must work with industry to find a place to anchor the assessment process. NaCCA should focus on its primary role of developing a curriculum for the country and monitoring its compliance.
“We cannot work with an organization that has openly declared its intention to support a particular publisher, encourage the Ministry of Education to produce its textbooks, and use all state power and resources allocated for the implementation of its mandate for such a self-serving agenda,” he noted.
GPA’s President further revealed that the Education Ministry has been unable to pay for textbooks ordered from the Association under the standard-based curriculum.
According to him, the books cost a total sum of GH₵320 million and have still not been settled.
“For the Ministry to proceed to commission a publisher to develop textbooks for the common core programme when books it ordered on credit 2.5 years ago have not been paid?
“What would be the rationale for the Ministry of Education instead of fulfilling its objective to allocate complete set of required textbooks to pupils (1:1) under the standard-based curriculum would go ahead to negotiate for the supply of textbooks under the common core programme?”he quizzed.
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