Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia has clarified recent statements about paying churches instead of taxing them to support their role as the government's development partners.

His initial comment was last week in the Bono Region during an engagement with some members of the clergy.

Pointing to the massive infrastructure contribution of the church in terms of schools, hospitals and universities; Bawumia added that instead of taxing churches, they would be incentivized under his presidency to do more.

A week on, the Vice President has clarified portions of his initial comment about paying churches.

At a campaign event in the North East Region (May 13), the New Patriotic Party flagbearer emphasised that he wanted to create a golden age of relationship between government and faith-based organizations.

"The church is the foremost development partner of government," he said stressing that if their support disappears, "Ghana will collapse because there will be chaos.

"At that point, I was joking and I said people are talking about taxing churches, I don't believe that and we would not tax churches, because if you look at the work the churches have done, then I was joking, that maybe we should have actually paid them for the work they did no really trying to tax them.

"But I wasn't really saying we should pay churches, I'm saying that we should give incentives to churches to do more..."

What Bawumia said initially:

“The question is are we going to tax churches? My view on this is simple. In fact, that is why I say that if you assess the work the church has done, we should rather be paying them rather than they paying us.

"Unless you don’t understand the work the church has done. If you look at the way they try to keep the society together, the universities, the hospitals, the schools, it is just massive. Many churches have hundreds of schools, massive.

“So I don’t see, and I will not have a situation where we are taxing churches. We rather want to give churches incentives to support what the government is doing.

"I want us to be partners in the way the development partners are with us. You are our domestic development partners and we will give you incentives to do more,” he stressed.