HEAVY TAXATION APPROACH NOT SUSTAINABLE

Sir,

There are three primary reasons for taxation and these are: (1) To fund government operations; health, education, security, social services etc. (2) To redistribute wealth – from the rich to the poor through improved social services. (3) To mitigate the negative effects of some consumer products by subsidising them. Simply put, taxation is the price we pay for belonging to a society and in our case the society of Eswatini. As long as government fails to be brutally honest with itself, there is no hope that the country will ever change its self-inflicted cash-flow problems.

Before deciding on taxing poor emaSwati further, government should identified where the leakages of our meagre resources are. It should ask itself why we should continue having a bloated Cabinet (relative to the population); what is the need for the various emabandla who are not cheap but continue to put a strain on the already cash strapped economy; what deliverables and key performance areas are in place for ministers and the various emabandla.

If government is serious about turning around the fortunes of our country, it needs to ask itself some very uncomfortable questions such as:

*If it was your business, would you continue funding the numerous vanity projects much against advice from experts?
*If it was your business, would you continue to keep a civil service that is bloated, demotivated and downright inefficient?
*If it was your business, would you continue to advise that we keep certain people in key positions well beyond the normal retirement age and expect them to deliver modern day solutions?
*If it was your business, would you continue on the trajectory of not embracing the intellectuals that you have spent our meagre resources developing being treated with contempt?
*If it was your business, would you be encouraging a situation where there are no minimum entry requirements for important positions such as legislators?

As long as it follows in the footsteps of its predecessors by tip-toeing around the real reasons why we are in this mess, then God Almighty knows that government failed even before it started its unenviable task of managing our resources. Taxes are an accepted necessity the world over but where the taxpayers get no value for their tax, it is downright criminal. What guarantees do the taxpayers have that their taxes will not be continuously squandered on vanity projects? What guarantees do the taxpayers have that their taxes will go towards their basic needs such as the provision of clean water, drugs in hospitals, improved road infrastructure etc?

Government should not be intimidated into justifying the clearly unjustifiable, but it should pursue an agenda of changing its thinking and mindset. Previous governments used the very same reasons the current has been advancing to the nation; that taxpayers’ lives will improve once we all tighten the belts but alas, they continued to spend will-nilly to the detriment of the rest of the nation.

Why do investors shun away from us when similar sized countries such as Rwanda are attracting huge investments? This could only mean one thing; the owners of capital don’t see us as a trustworthy destination for their money, they see us as a serious risk and unless we tackle that perception government will continue taxing us to the bone until there is nothing to tax.

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