{"id":131152,"date":"2016-07-01T06:14:03","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T05:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/?p=131152"},"modified":"2016-07-01T06:14:48","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T05:14:48","slug":"natcoms-slams-services-tax-bill-says-its-retrogressive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/?p=131152","title":{"rendered":"NATCOMS Slams Services Tax Bill &#8230;Says It\u2019s Retrogressive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The National Associa<br \/>\ntion of Telecommunication Subscribers (NATCOMS), says the proposed Communications Services Tax (CST) Bill will impact negatively on the National Broadband plan.<br \/>\nNational President of NATCOMS Mr Adeolu Ogunbanjo, disclosed this in a statement obtained by our correspondent in Lagos on Wednesday.<br \/>\nThe statement quoted Ogunbanjo as saying that the proposed bill would also make telecom services expensive.<br \/>\n\u201cAlready, subscribers are battling with very low purchasing power as well as very low discretionary income.<br \/>\n\u201cThe proposed communications services tax bill is anti-people, anti-masses and totally against the low income earners, who are not even enjoying the benefit of our abundant oil and gas endowment,\u201d he said.<br \/>\nHe explained that as communications cuts across the poor and the rich, the addition of other forms of taxes would deprive the poor the right to communicate and access online information.<br \/>\nThe NATCOM president urged the Federal Government not to deny the people access to communications services, saying that other countries were continuously working out ways to deliver affordable communication services to their people.<br \/>\nHe said that communication services were part of the ways government could improve on the lives of its citizens.<br \/>\n\u201cCommunications services have become today\u2019s basic needs for both poor and rich and our government is now taking it away from the poor.<br \/>\n\u201cIt is highly retrogressive and unthinkable at this time of economic hardships,\u201d he said.<br \/>\nThe Tide reports that the communications services tax bill introduced sometime by the National Assembly seeks to impose; charge and collect communication service Tax (CST) from subscribers.<br \/>\nIt will be levied on service fees payable by users of electronic communication services at nine per cent and will be borne by the customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The National Associa tion of Telecommunication Subscribers (NATCOMS), says the proposed Communications Services Tax (CST) Bill will impact negatively on the National Broadband plan. National President of NATCOMS Mr Adeolu Ogunbanjo, disclosed this in a statement obtained by our correspondent in Lagos on Wednesday. The statement quoted Ogunbanjo as saying that the proposed bill would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":131156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-icttelecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/131156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}