By Karimatou Jallow
As things are becoming more tighter for everyone in the business community, the Firewood sellers also are complaining about the high taxes levelled on their trade while they too are appealing to the government to help slash down tax on their business.
Thousands of Gambians, on daily basis, use firewood for cooking in both rural and urban settlements, but environmentalists warned that it results in deforestation.
Mamajang Kurubally, who sells firewood in Bakoteh said: “these woods are coming from different places however we face many challenges before we reach our final destination for supplying. We always pay some amount of money on the way before reaching the supplying destination, if not we would not be able to make it to the destination. This is because they will not allow us to move until we pay them and every day, we are paying tax to the government, too.”
He noted that they have no place to keep their woods and that is not safe as they will be stolen unaware, “we call on the government to reduce the tax payment because it is from this business, we feed our families and pay our children school fees,” he appealed to the authorities.
Samba Ceesay, also a firewood seller said: “things are very hard because we used to buy pillar of wood for D2000 but now we are buying it D3000 this is as result of those exporting the wood are no longer exporting them like. They are afraid to pay huge money on the way and the roads also are not well constructed to suit the trucks so, it takes days or weeks before we reach to our final destination.”
According to him, they don’t have places to store their woods and it disturbs them a lot especially during the rainy season because many of their customers wouldn’t buy the woods when it is wet.
Like others, he begged government to reduce the tax they are paying to enable them meet with personal and family commitments.