Instead of protests, monitor how county taxes are put to use

Kongowea market traders protest last week over high levies introduced by the county government. Photo/Laban Walloga. 

By CAROL MUSYOKA

In Summary

• The conversation should now change to one on accountability.

This week, I had purposed to unpack the NSSF Act 2013. Then my favourite tax guru sent me some information on the same to help me break it down.

I got a headache by the time I got to the calculations and collapsed into a veritably confused heap. I tossed that idea out of the window immediately.

So I switched to my current favourite subject: “Devil-ution”. On August 4 2010, Kenyans voted 66.9 per cent in favour of the new Constitution that created a devolved system of government. We did this.

It wasn’t shoved down our throats by the existing government nor was it a roadside declaration by the then president. We exercised our democratic rights to do this to ourselves.

What we failed to pay attention to was that it was going to require a lot of money. The naysayers at the time told us as much. But we ignored them. The devil is always in the detail, and the devil-ution chicken has come home to roost.

Now citizens are up in arms at the new taxation measures that county governments are undertaking in order to finance their operations. The sad and hopeless fact is that the primary revenue source for any government is taxation.

Many people do not seem to realise this. Perhaps a history of taxation is relevant here. The website e-file.com has a rich history of taxation and reveals that the earliest known tax was implemented in Mesopotamia over 4500 years ago, where people paid taxes throughout the year in the form of livestock, which was the preferred currency at the time.

There were also many unusual taxes incurred by ancient governments with the aim of raising revenue. For instance, during the 1st century AD, Roman emperor Vaspasian placed a tax on urine. Buyers of the urine paid the tax.

The urine from public urinals was sold as an essential ingredient for several chemical processes e.g. it was used in tanning and also by launderers as a source of ammonia to clean and whiten woollen togas etc.

Therefore, those who obtained valuable urine from collectors were charged a tax. Centuries later, King Henry I allowed knights to opt out of their duties to fight in wars by paying a tax called “scutage”.

At first the tax was not high, but then King John came to power and raised it to a rate of 300 per cent. Some claim that the excessive tax rate was one of the things that contributed to the creation of the Magna Carta, which limited the king’s power.

In 1660, England placed a tax on fireplaces. The tax led to people covering their fireplaces with bricks to conceal them and avoid paying the tax. It was repealed in 1689. In 1696, England implemented a window tax, taxing houses based on the number of windows they had.

That led to many houses having very few windows in order to avoid paying the tax. Eventually this became a health problem and ultimately led to the tax’s repeal in 1851.

In the 1700’s, England placed a tax on bricks. Builders soon realised that they could use bigger bricks (and thus fewer bricks) to pay less tax. Soon after, the government caught on and placed a larger tax on bigger bricks. Brick taxes were finally repealed in 1850.

There are numerous other examples of strange taxes that were created around the world, but the important outcome of the taxes was the avoidance mechanisms that citizens would put in place to mitigate the expense.