This illustrates part of the problem, as taxation and especially tax administration has to parts, what is levelled at the consumer and what is levelled simply at the value chain, where traders at different levels are vital components

WHILE most of the past generation had learned and bequeathed to the youth all over Africa the merits of African society and demerits of foreign culture, the basis premise of which is a whole series of property structures where a collective ethic instead of individual ownership has pride of place, there is reason to worry that all this is crumbling. There is a feeling everywhere that Africa can no longer put up with the taxation that governments need to keep public services running, and meet reasonable expectations of various layers of civil servants. What happened across the border is smoldering here, with tax fatigue, etc.

There are facets of the tax fatigue that are being noticed, and both of them boil down to the same syndrome, excessive taxation. Someone hearing that demand would think that there is a tendency raising taxes in Kenya or taxation is punitive or pernicious in Tanzania. For instance there was no trader level revolt in Kenya but at the level of the unemployed portion of society, who are no longer the less educated these days. And apart from the fact of having large numbers of graduates, they are all in social media irrespective of education.

This illustrates part of the problem, as taxation and especially tax administration has to parts, what is levelled at the consumer and what is levelled simply at the value chain, where traders at different levels are vital components. This is how ‘value added tax’ is levelled, itself a misdirected epithet as ‘value’ is not added during distribution until the produce reaches the consumer. What increases is the price as bringing the produce to the consumer has to be a viable business, but it doesn’t involve changing the product at all.

The difficulties that are being felt don’t arise from newly fangled habits of excessive taxation, as it is unlikely to be the case as all these years the taxation was seen as normal. There was a time of forceful taxation which sort of raised the roots for the current situation, namely a situation where state prerogatives and those of civil society, including the business community, come to loggerheads. There was a change of tone in how revenue authorities ought to collect taxes but no change of methods in relation to electronic gadgets designed to ‘see everything’ so that there are optimal levels of tax collection.

What is thus happening is that the state needs the same amounts of money (no change in VAT quotations for that matter) while the currency is sliding in its value. Purchasing power keeps sliding on the part of consumers and finally reaches breaking point, while traders’ profit margins are narrower as purchasing goods becomes more expensive due to currency slide. There is similarly no room to raise prices as competition will up-end those who opt to raise prices, since there are more consumers but also more traders; no price rise.

That is how we arrive at the traders’ outcry that there are multiple regulatory bodies and agencies, a stifling bureaucracy which impedes business growth. These regulatory bodies are specialized hut traders tend to meet several of them, an issue that comes up again despite the government cancelling many agro-sector levies and industrial service levies, where the once levied revenues are now allocated by central government budgeting to those agencies. Cancelling more of such levies implies that the government free up its subsidy demanding and loan-amassing public firms, and few African countries are ready to do that, and when chaos surfaces due to income despair, they fine-tune the politics, etc.