LISTENING to streams of views being given onb designing a final version of Vision 2050, a number of key themes are emerging. There is a sort of contrast between the themes raised by the planners and emphasis by civic groups, where the difference lies in the line of stress rather than what is included. That is why from a general view the position by the Christian Council of Tanzania (CCT) on the need for enshrining eased business regulations in the Vision looks fairly ordinary, but it is in a sense a novelty. The idea there is that people have faith in private enterprise rather than government plans as such.

The CCT director of development and advocacy issued this appeal at an interfaith committee meeting, highlighting ongoing complaints from entrepreneurs about the complex process of obtaining permits, as well as taxes. It was clear that the concern here was with the tax levels and procedures, and significantly saw reluctance to comply as tied up with such procedures. It was an expression of faith in those who conduct business, as they wish to comply but are subjected to stringent demands that make it hard to walk the talk, fulfill duties.

The private sector could hardly have improved on his remarks that these cumbersome processes often lead to tax evasion, which in turn harms the national economy. In other words the right solution is to simplify business regulations so that rules respect the market, favour taxpayers, and by implication foster business growth and higher state revenues. The current climate favours high taxes, stringent regulations and often muscled enforcement to collect big revenues, which succeeds in the short term but inhibits business growth, jobs.

Talking about the need to simplify business regulations by reducing the number of permits required also has an element of compromising about some dearly held yardsticks, for instance key environmental controls as well as corporate social responsibility. There are extensive pressure to make CSR statutory, which skips the fact that CSR is a contribution that comes up after statutory taxes have been paid. At most the tax design has a wink towards CSR as fallback option, just.

An observation that this will help to streamline business operations and accelerate national development would appear straightforward to most observers, but reading between the lines, official planning intuition is that it is taxes which facilitate development. The problem is perennially that the notion of development had greater or perhaps predominant hearing to that of economic growth, where there is a rule of referring to vague aggregates like 5.8 percent. The difficulty is that investments for instance into infrastructure are piled up in the growth data or income statistics, while jobs data is the real indicator.

There are still numerous weak areas in how the vision consultation is being pursued, for instance the lack of correlation between public services and remuneration of civil servants. It is decades since most public sector employees were living on their salaries, as in the early 1990s a review of terms of civil service engagement merged terms of service for parastatal executives into generalized terms for managers or civil service executives. The result is predominant use of public funds for ‘other needs’ over and above salaries, which hinders the government’s capacity to employ teachers or medical staff, chiefly.