By Sallieu T. Kamara
In years past in Sierra Leone, local tax was collected in the early dry season, a period many people considered to be the season of plenty. With the completion of harvesting of both upland and swamp rice farms, the period between December and February was always a joyous celebration of life in the villages. Food was plentiful and the local economies buoyant. So despite the usual deep-seated hatred for taxes, people paid their local tax without much coercion. But today, local tax is collected in the rainy season, the season of hunger and want. And at this time of the year in rural communities, only a few people are able to scarcely scrape a living. This is why I believe it is economically and morally unsound to collect local tax in the rainy season; a time the people do not even have enough food to eat? Sometimes, it makes me wonder if those charged with the responsibility of internal revenue generation in the country are really serious about it. If anything, how can the local tax authorities explain the change from the dry season to the rainy season and why they continue to hold on to it even when revenues from local tax continue to take a nosedive? There is no disputing the fact that taxes are necessary for the good health of any nation state. Governments – local or national – spend lots of money every hour of the week on many things for the wellbeing of their citizens including schools, hospitals, roads, water and sanitation, food, courts, social security, security, civil servants, recreation, sports and many more. To pay for these bills, governments need money and a large chunk of it is coming, or should come, from taxes. The Holy Books are very clear on this. Taxes are permissible, as long as they are not unreasonable and are used to provide public goods and services to the people. When in the book of Mathew the Pharisees asked Jesus whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he responded by saying: “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”. And for the people to be able to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”, a conducive environment must be created. The authorities that are assigned the task of administering taxes must not be oblivious to the economic and social dynamics of the country, particularly rural communities where a bulk of the local tax payers lives. It’s no gainsaying that the collection of local tax in the past couple of years has been a total failure. The revenues from local tax each year have fallen far below the projected incomes. Is this not reason enough for the local tax authorities to take a deep reflection to find out what has gone wrong? Even as a layman in council tax issues, my reading and analysis of the situation suggest that there are several factors responsible for the dismal performance in local tax collection in rural communities. In the olden days when council tax was collected in the dry season, people were willing to pay because it was a matter of necessity for every adult male to possess a local tax receipt; a necessity that was ably supported by the availability of resources. Let’s look at it. It is in the early dry season that local communities organize many activities and events in which every adult male will want to participate because it is prestigious to do so. And for this participation to be guaranteed, they need to possess a local tax receipt so as to enable them move around freely. Can you imagine what will be the public perception of an adult male whose movements are restricted just because he has refused or is unable to pay his local tax? Your guess is as good as mine. It is also during the early dry season, the period immediately after harvest, that many rural people visit their relatives in Freetown and other urban areas. This is a cooling-off period; the period between the end of one farming season and the beginning of a new one. And for them to undertake these trips in those days, they needed a visa in the form of a local tax receipt because it was the local tax collection period. If they did not have it, they would not dare go anywhere because chiefdom police officers were deployed throughout the length and breadth of the country to ensure that every adult male paid his local tax. Where you were coming from, or were going to, did not matter to them. What mattered was that you produced your local tax receipt on request, or you faced the consequences. The law then was that if you remained seated in a vehicle, nobody would ask you to produce your local tax receipts. But no sooner did you step even a single step that you would be requested to produce your tax receipt or made to pay there and then. There was no compromise about it. The law was very rigid and it was strictly enforced. The sight of chiefdom police officers and local court clerks alone was enough to instill fear into defaulter and enforce compliance. I can still vividly recall some of our uncles wanting to travel outside the village. Those who did not have local tax receipts would borrow such from those who did and were not traveling at the point in time. Since they did not have photos, it was easy for Sallieu to pass for Umaru, for example. This was not a common practice, though, because it somewhat demeaned the social status of the borrower. Also, because the timing of local tax collection was very apt, people found it not only easy to pay, but also a necessity to do so. Only a few people resorted to antics that were meant to beat the system. But today, local tax is collected in the height of the rainy season – a period local tax receipts are of less necessity to rural farmers. The men leave their houses to go to their farms at the crack of dawn and stay there until nightfall. The women stay behind in the morning to get a few items of cooking condiments and later go to the farm with the kids to join their husbands. So they have nothing to do in the villages. Some even sleep on their farms, particularly if they know that local tax collection is in progress. All this is happening because of the wrong timing of collecting local tax. When you go to the rural areas during the rainy season, villages are virtually deserted and only the aged are around. I have always doubted the wisdom of collecting local tax in the rainy season. The fact that most people have not been complying with their local tax since its collection shifted to the rainy season should have caused the authorities concerned to revert to the old timing that used to produce incredible results. Taxes are the lifeblood of a government, just as tithing is to the church. It is only through taxation that individuals and private businesses cede monies to their governments. Taxes provide, or rather should provide, citizens with benefits every hour of the day, every day of the week and every week of the year. This is where, I believe, the moral aspect of taxation comes in. Taxes are a kind of social contract between citizens and their governments. By paying taxes, the people are fulfilling their own side of the social contract, and in return expecting their governments to make them enjoy the full benefits of being citizens of their countries. In one of his articles on taxation, Linguist George Lakoff writes: “T.R. Reid, in his book The United States of Europe, tells a story which illustrates this point very well. He lived in Great Britain for years, and at first he was stunned by the 17.5% tax that was added to virtually every purchase he made. ‘I kept wondering: Why do the Brits put up with a tax that is high?’ He came to understand the answer to this question when his youngest daughter had to go to the emergency room with a severely infected ear. After a wait of fifteen minutes, his daughter was seen and given effective treatment. Grateful, he went to pay the bill only to have the nurse proudly announce to him that ‘There won’t be a bill to pay. We do it a bit differently here. In the National Health Service, we don’t charge for medical treatment. And suddenly he ‘got it’ about the taxes”. This, in effect, is saying that taxes must be seen to be working for the people. This is the greatest motivation for paying taxes; where there are serious doubts as to whether taxes are used for the benefits of the masses, the people will fiercely resist paying. In Sierra Leone, particularly in Freetown and other cities, people are frightfully worried that their taxes are not working for them. In all the country’s municipalities and other local governments, almost all development programmes are funded by the central government or other donor agencies and bilateral and multi-lateral institutions. This creates serious doubts in the minds of the people about what their leaders do with their taxes. There is a deep and growing resentment against the payment of local tax in the country, both at the chiefdom and municipality levels. This is because the people have lost hope in the ability and willingness of local government authorities to make their taxes create conducive life for them: the roads are bad, streets dirty, bridges broken, school furniture old and inadequate, school fees and school charges exorbitant and beyond the reach of the ordinary tax payer, basic drugs in hospitals very expensive and sometimes unavailable, and the list goes on and on. This represents a glaring breach of the social contract that warrants the people to pay taxes by these governments. There is, therefore, every need for these local authorities to take decisive measures to restore hope amongst the local tax paying population. They need to be assured that the local tax they pay will make them access good quality and affordable goods and services that will correspondingly make their lives better and more secure. It should not be a kind of Osusu whereby each year a single individual or group of individuals will cart away every single Leone that was collected. It was a common practice in the days gone by and no serious action was ever taken against those involved in this nefarious practice to serve as a deterrent. It is high time we changed direction and made the local tax to have meaning in the lives of the taxpayer.
