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We the people, not just media, should query leaders on taxes, By Elsie Eyakuze

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Former Comptroller and Auditor-General Prof Mussa Assad had some choice words for Tanzanian media recently in remarks about taxes, fees, levies, et cetera. Roughly translated, he said that if journalists took their jobs seriously they would put a lot of effort into querying elected politicians about their taxes instead of issuing a barrage of weak content.

Interesting. I wonder if he knows that Tanzania Revenue Authority’s tweet the other day about their new TikTok account. While he is out there perseverating about how to distribute the tax burden more justly, TRA has signed on to a popular social media platform that has some espionage and security issues.

Prof Assad is right, we should be asking about the taxes paid by our elected officials. To that I would add the entire public sector. I read a tweet from a Kenyan who alleged that big political families in Kenya are not paying taxes, and why don’t they get the kind of scrutiny that the Kenya Revenue Authority is trying to subject other Kenyans to. The KRA’s move to inhabit Kenyans’ phones and garnish taxes off their accounts and mobile money accounts is the stuff of technological dystopia nightmares.

Vote in their own favour

We’re not there yet, but we share the Who Pays Taxes question with our neighbours. I think Prof Assad is aware, as we all are, that legislators vote in their own favour all the time and they will not legislate to increase their tax burden and this is Tanzania. Journalists spend plenty of time with politicians, they tend to know what interviews can yield good information. Asking a secondary school student about their views on progressive taxation is interesting, asking a seasoned politician that question, especially if they know what you are up to, will yield a lot of hot air.

Investigating, documenting and then publicising their income streams and actual tax records, though? Bruh. Is he offering protection? When journalists go off to ask difficult questions of the powerful, they rarely come back. That is a strong disincentive for journalists.

This is Tanzania. We have an economic philosophy of hunger and big bellies. When a person succeeds enough to get a good position in government, the pressure to bend the rules will come from sponsors, sponsees, friends and family, who stand to benefit from patronage. Patronage is a very expensive political system for the patron, requiring access to vast amounts of money. This encourages behaviour that is corrupt, and it incentivises MPs to award themselves fat salaries and very low taxes, which they may avoid with no consequences.

What Prof Assad should really be asking is why the collective doesn’t rise up and ask their MPs about their tax records and tax policies, especially during election years. Why place the burden of inquiry on the media when everyone can be recruited?

We, the people, are the majority, and we have certainly been vocal as consumers about questioning and grappling with and even rejecting fees, levies and taxes before. And yet time and time again we vote for the very same Party and people who are apparently living off the sweat of our brows. A far more interesting story, that, and worthy of the time and effort.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; Email elsieeyakuze@gmail.com 

Strictly Personal

Help! There’s a dangerous, secret plot to save the EAC from imminent death, By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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In an interview with NTV Keny, at the start of the week, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame painted a rather bleak picture of the East African Community (EAC).

 

He suggested the saga of the East African Regional Force (EACRF) to the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which was kicked out ignominiously by a disgruntled government in Kinshasa, was a low point. He said to date, no one has even bothered to formally brief the EAC heads of state on what happened.

 

This debacle, coming on the back of numerous ugly trade and diplomatic spats, despite the latest expansion to include Somalia as the eighth member of the bloc, does not inspire a lot of confidence about the EAC’s future. In Kampala, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni, once the choir leader of the EAC, no longer gets so excited about it.

 

Good East Africans are looking on with alarm. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-East-African Ugandan lawyer wrote to say he has conceived of a plan that will get regional leaders to fall into each other’s arms and turbo charge unification.

 

He plans to arouse patriotic East Africans to establish a radical revolutionary front called the East African Liberation and Unification Front (Ealuf) to work regionally to pressure the governments in Nairobi, Dodoma, Kampala, Kigali, Kinshasa, Juba, Gitega (the newish Burundi political capital), and Mogadishu with an alternative political structure. Ealuf will look to create an East African Peoples Republic.

 

It will have an agenda to abolish all restrictions on travel across borders, have zero tax rates for regional trade, create a regional digital currency, and create a roaring common market, among other things.

 

He believes the leaders will come together at 6G speed, and work hand in hand to stop the ideas espoused by Ealuf from gaining political traction, with its grand vision of a truly meaningful borderless East Africa. In the process, they will move forward with integration to Ealuf.

 

It is likely too, that they will not come together to collectively save their jobs. They might form an East African Emergency Unity Summit (EAEUS), to fight back. President Museveni might want to chair it as the region’s “elder statesman”, having been in power for nearly 40 years.

 

However, some leaders would oppose him, saying he has eaten for long at the top, and should let a younger leader, “new blood”, like Burundi President Évariste Ndayishimiye, or Kenya’s William Ruto, lead it. They will accuse him of scheming to install himself as the East African supreme leader, and clinging on to power until one of his grandchildren was ready to take over from him.

 

Museveni will push back, citing their inexperience. Some will demand that South Sudan President Salva Kiir pay all the arrears his country owes the EAC before it gets full rights in EAEUS. DRC President Felix Tshisekedi will push to exclude President Kagame from taking a seat until Rwanda stops its support for M23 rebels. President Kagame will tell him to go and swim with crocodiles in the Congo River.

 

Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud will complain that the other leaders are disrespecting him because he is an EAC newbie, and until they change their attitude, he is staying in Mogadishu.

 

As they squabble, some groups might see an opportunity. Al Shabaab might reform, disavow violence, elect new moderate leaders and seek to ally with the regional integration activists as Ealuf-Horn of Africa.

 

In M23 allies with some of the 120 rebel groups and form Ealuf-Congo Basin. A bid by externally based Ugandan groups like a rump Lord’s Resistance Army emerging from the forests of the Central African Republic, and the Allied Democratic Forces in the eastern DRC is rejected, because they have failed to demonstrate good faith credentials.

 

Meanwhile, Ealuf is spreading like wildfire. Large numbers of Ealuf are reported to have hired boats near Entebbe in Uganda, and Mwanza in Tanzania sailing fast on Lake Victoria and converging on Kisumu, where local integrationist forces have mobilised and turned the city into a hotbed of East African unification. In DRC, bands are composing new songs praising the new people’s unification efforts. Young people are organising to link their hands along the half of the 770-kilometre Kenya-Tanzania.

 

All over East Africa, there are reports of high school boys and girls disappearing in large numbers to join Ealuf cadre training camps.

 

Traders are staging solidarity rallies and vowing to divert the taxes they pay to states to Ealuf, and stories of market women all over the region raising money and sending food to the heroic mobilisers are spreading far and wide.

 

International comrades from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia are arriving in large numbers in East Africa and joining. Word leaks that some of the EAC presidents are sending out feelers, seeking to meet with Ealuf to cut deals. There are rumours that they are paying some Ealuf leaders big money to defect. The hardliners in Ealuf reject the olive branches, and there is some division in the ranks and a witch hunt for the “traitors,” who are eating money from the presidents.

 

Ealuf recovers and marches on. EAEUS reaches out with an official offer to sit down and dialogue with Ealuf about the formation of an East African Amalgamation. Whether they stick together or get divided, the leaders lose. But Ealuf has only won the first round. This is not over by any means.

 

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3

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Strictly Personal

Is Nigeria’s security challenge intractable? By Jide Ojo

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Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution says the security and welfare of citizens shall be the primary purpose of the government. Quite unfortunately, successive administrations have failed to meet these requirements, and the current Bola Tinubu administration is equally failing. Right now, instead of people’s standard of living improving, it is depreciating and everybody is worried about the intolerable level of insecurity in this country.

This newspaper, in its editorial of Monday, March 11, 2024, chronicled the spate of mass abductions that have recently taken place in the country. It stated, “Within the past week, Boko Haram insurgents and bandits have successfully abducted over 404 Nigerians across three North-East and North-West states. This is unparalleled and ominous for the rest of the fragile country. For the President, it calls for a swift re-evaluation of the subsisting national security strategies, which appear ineffective against the hordes from hell perpetrating this criminality.”

It went further, “Indeed, it is the familiar Salafist modus operandi all over again: The predation on women, pupils, and other soft targets. Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday. This is less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren were abducted from the LEA Primary School in Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State. A few days before the Kaduna incident, over 200 female internally displaced persons were forcefully taken away by terrorists in three IDP camps in Borno State. The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gamboru Ngala, while fetching firewood in the bush to sell.” The PUNCH submitted that, “Data indicates that about 1,548 schoolchildren have been abducted in 11 separate incidents of mass abduction by terrorists and bandits in northern Nigeria between April 2014 and June 2021.”

What are the implications of insecurity in Nigeria? First, it hampers economic growth and development. Many businesses have shut down due to these ceaseless kidnappings, banditry and insurgencies. Many of those internally displaced have lost their means of livelihood and have become economically dependent on the government and charity organisations. Thus, rather than contributing to economic growth, they become liabilities. There is now low investor’ confidence in Nigeria, as no foreign investor will want to come and set up business in a volatile country like ours unless they are into the sales and marketing of security gadgets and bulletproof vehicles.

Insecurity is also one of the drivers of the ‘japa’ phenomenon, as many Nigerians besiege embassies of foreign countries to flee their fatherland. Many don’t even bother to go to embassies; they simply embark on a hazardous journey of being trafficked through the desert and the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to irregularly migrate to Europe for safety and a better life.

I saw a journalist friend of mine sometime in January after a long while. As we chatted, I asked how he was coping with the astronomic rise in the cost of living. He sighed and said it had not been easy. I then complimented him on living in his own house in Abuja when I, who had been in Abuja for over 20 years, still lived in a rented apartment.  He corrected me and said he had fled his house in the Bwari area of Abuja due to the incessant raids of kidnappers in his community and is now living in a rented apartment like me. That’s how insecurity has also impacted family life. Imagine the pain of having to relocate from your home, not because of any natural disaster like an earthquake or flood but due to the activities of bandits.

Food inflation, which has risen above 35 percent, is also a result of food production shortages linked to the activities of bandits who not only demand access and harvest fees from farmers but routinely raid farm settlements to abduct, maim and kill the farmers who are feeding the nation.  Health-wise, many Nigerians are suffering from panic attacks, paranoia, schizophrenia and trauma as a result of the scary news of abductions and acts of terrorism being daily reported in the media. Many of us could no longer sleep with our eyes closed. In many communities, people now live in fortresses and under self-imposed curfews. As described by the renowned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book titled Leviathan “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It is not as if the federal and state governments have been standing akimbo, watching helplessly. Funding for security and defence has increased exponentially. According to the earlier referenced editorial of this newspaper published on Monday, “The Federal Government, as part of efforts to keep the country secure, disbursed N231.27 billion to procure arms and ammunition for security agencies and officers between 2020 and 2024. This is beside the yearly budgets of the Ministry of Defence and eight other forces between 2020 and 2022, put at N11.72 billion, N10.78 billion, and N9.64 billion, respectively. More recently, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the government procured N5 trillion worth of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles for the security forces, per the NBS report ‘Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics.’ This is in addition to other security hardware.”

The Muhammadu Buhari administration established the Police Equipment Trust Fund just as a handful of states have similarly done. Many states have established vigilantes or state-owned security agencies, with the latest being Zamfara State, which early in the year established Community Protection Guards. Recall that the six south-west states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo and Osun, on January 9, 2020, established Amotekun to fight insecurity. Consideration has been given to the establishment of state police, with a committee set up to come up with a framework.

With all these aforementioned initiatives, why is Nigeria still largely insecure? The answer to this can be found in the hardware solutions without a significant component of the software solutions. I daresay that even the hardware efforts have been largely ineffective due to a lack of sufficient well-trained and motivated security personnel. We have not also adopted technology-driven security solutions. There are several modern tech gadgets such as satellite orbiters, drones, CCTV, scanners, jammers, communication gadgets and forensic laboratories, that Nigerian security forces do not have or have in insufficient quantities.

On the software side, unless and until we frontally tackle the challenges of unemployment, poverty and hunger, whatever hardware equipment we acquire will not resolve our security challenge. These variables drive crimes and criminality. People will not blink an eyelid to commit crimes if they are starving. The popular adage is also that an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. If people are not gainfully employed and are poor, they will constitute a nuisance and danger to the rest of society.

I think the time has come for the Nigerian president to seek international assistance to bring the security challenge effectively under control. We should also mobilise our able-bodied retired security personnel to help combat the increasing insecurity. There is also a need to do something about our porous borders, where small arms and light weapons are indiscriminately smuggled into the country and used by bandits to terrorise innocent Nigerians.

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