On taxes and our vampire states
Drained, disregarded, and discarded – we are not the tax base African governments dream of.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki
With both international “aid” and trade shrinking, the solution is “local revenue generation”. Or so economists tell our governments.
The theory is simple. We give up some individual freedoms in return for collective protections. We delegate some personal sovereignty to benefit from state sovereignty. We contribute to the state purse – through taxes – to pay for public goods and services. At a minimum, basic infrastructure and security. More aspirationally: education, healthcare, housing, pensions, and social security.
The social contract. Oiled by tax. That’s the theory.
In practice, however, our social contract is beyond broken. Our states are vampiric, as a friend of mine says. They suck the blood out of us, tossing most of us aside afterwards. They reward a chosen few, transforming them into vampires themselves, to keep the performance ticking along.
Our states actively wrest our freedoms from us daily. For every centimetre we give, they take a kilometre. Their denizens have no concept that states have sovereignty only because we delegate it to them.
When there are elections, this is another avenue for empty performances. Military takeovers are on trend – or soldiers backing the installations of “new” iterations of the same old, as they did in Zimbabwe. And a growing number of African states are now under outright military rule, again: Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Sudan.
Military men say they are there only to restore the social contract, cheered on by citizens who jump too easily on external scapegoats for our common conditions. They’ll be out in a year or two, they promise. More like never. No matter how youthful their countenance, their impacts are the same: a diminishing of civic resistance.
In their place, they offer us tired tropes: calls to versions of culture, tradition, and religion that are old, repressive, and outdated. Down with women. Down with African queers and other people labelled as friends of the degenerate West. Up with whatever can be touted as the answer to said West. Like the East – never mind its own exploitative tendencies.
Some of us continue to cheer. Cultural, traditional, and religious conservatives, of course – but also, more alarmingly, some of the African Left. Except for African feminists, who rightfully see in the repudiation of women and queer people the beginnings of an inevitable race to the bottom.
Stuck in this abusive subjugation, economists tell us that we pay the lowest tax of all regions. Well, of course we do, given the state of our social contract. Why volunteer to pay more taxes? To feed the black holes of the vampires’ arteries? It’s not like they are not taking whatever they can by legal and extra-legal sleight of hand.
National tax incomes amount to just 16% of African GDP. Just less than 40% of that comes from indirect taxes on goods and services because most forms of personal income escape the tax authorities’ radars.
Only 18% of Africans are in formal employment. The wealthiest evade most taxes, particularly on property ownership and capital gains, because states underinvest in property and company registries. Our states want taxes but don’t care to create formal jobs or invest in robust infrastructure. Or in security, except that of the state and its functions. Good luck to them.
For the wealthiest Africans, their social contract is with themselves – their ability to pay private providers for security, education, healthcare, housing, and helicopters to hop over terrible roads. Poor Africans need the state but it is absent. So they take remittances from relatives to pay for the public goods and services that those consumption taxes already extracted didn’t buy.
The Institute of Security Studies estimates that 65% (!) and 50% of households in Kenya and Gambia, respectively, rely on remittances. Neither group – neither the wealthy nor the poor – will volunteer to pay more taxes to states that disregard them.
Vampires. No social contract. No taxes.