Mr Dan Lartey, Presidential candidate of the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), on Wednesday said he will abolish the Value Added Tax (VAT) when he is voted into power.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra, he said the country does not manufacture anything that necessitates the use of VAT as a tax system.

"We only import goods and put VAT on them to burden importers with double VAT as most of those imports have attracted VAT in their countries of origin," he said.

Mr Lartey said until the country "domesticates and begins to process its raw materials in local industries on a high scale," VAT would not be an appropriate tax system in Ghana.

"My GCPP government will restore the sales, personal and services tax systems that this country used to have to ease the tax burden on our traders," he said.

He said under the "domestication" policy of the GCPP, there is provision for the introduction of VAT at the appropriate time, when the local manufacturing industry has improved enough to make Ghana self-sufficient in food production.

Mr Lartey also promised to give every Ghanaian worker a cost-of-living allowance as the first step of solving the income and living standard problems.

"Prior to our permanent improved income structure, we shall give every Ghanaian worker a cost of living allowance to encourage him/her to work harder as we prepare to solve the low income problem," he said.

He also assured the public of free education from the nursery to the tertiary level, saying that the country has the capital base for that. What is needed is how to tap it; and GCPP has the ability to do so, he said.

On why his party does not have a full complement of parliamentary candidates, Mr Lartey said that is not necessary, since MPs, despite their political parties, are supposed to work in the interest of the whole nation.

He said the GCPP has the ability to get the consent of and make use of all the 200 MPs for the development of the country.

Mr Lartey dismissed statements by the ruling party that it moved the economy from below negative growth rate to the current 4.4 per cent, saying that the current state of the economy reflects more poor people than rich people.

"Over the past 19 years the PNDC/NDC governments have failed to make the poor rich and the rich poor as they promised," he said adding, "The rich has become richer and the poor, poorer."

This, he said, is because the government, like all other past governments, has fallen into the trap of neo-colonialism set by the colonial masters which works in favour of Western countries to the detriment of the country's development.