OF TAXES AND CORRUPTION

Here are some rapid fire figures that you may or may not have known.

Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is celebrating its 30 years of existence this year.

In the year URA opened its doors for business, the size of the Uganda economy was $3.32billion according to the World Bank.

Last financial year URA revenue collections came in at sh19trillion or about $5.3b.

So, URA last year collected one and a half times the economic output of Uganda in the year that it was launched. Assuming everything remains the same (Covid-19 emphasized how redundant such an assumption is), URA will collect at least, the equivalent of the country’s GDP in 1991 every year into the future...

That is an interesting statistic on several fronts but two leap to mind.

One, is that despite these consistent gains in revenue collection, we still need to collect more revenue as 13 percent of GDP, which last year’s collections represent, cannot support our development goals.

And secondly, to think how small the economy was in 1991 relative to today shows how far we have come. If all goes well, we will be saying the same thing 30 years from now about the size of the Uganda economy today.

Unfortunately, as it often is with Uganda every achievement comes up against an equal or more dramatic downside.

This week the new Inspector General of Government Betty Kamya reported that corruption accounts for sh20trillion annually. I thought there must have been a printing error because that would have been half of last year’s budget or as pointed above all our tax revenues gobbled up by rapacious public officials. It is inconceivable that government would have been able to function to any level, if half the budget was stolen.

Kamya explained that sh131.2b was due to lost taxes, sh233b in regulation related losses, sh451b losses in the education and health sectors, sh459.2b to misuse of public facilities, sh590b in procurements these are the ones we know and come up to about two trillion shillings. A heftier sum than estimates of a few years ago of sh500b lost to corruption annually. Clearly there has been some steady progress in this respect.

To this number the new IGG added losses due to absenteeism of about sh2trillion and to round it off sh15trillion in losses due to environmental degradation.

"While it was a relief to know that the rapacity of our public servants had not hyper inflated, there is still a lot of cause for worry....

In my book corruption is one of the biggest causes of inequitable distribution of the benefits of the growth of the last three decades.

The budget this year stands sh44trillion assuming a population of 44 million that means the government plans to spend a million shillings per Ugandan. So the two trillion lost in taxes, procurements and misuse of public facilities is the allocation for two million Ugandans gone into a handful of people’s pockets. And after denying the two million Ugandans security, infrastructure and social services what do this handful of officials do with their ill-gotten gains? They improve the security around their mansions, fly their children to school out of the country and themselves for annual health checks, that is before we talk about lavish holidays in the Seychelles, Cape Town or the French Riviera.

It is already bad enough that government is spending a miniscule million shillings annually on every citizen without some rapacious officials keeping for themselves the entitlement of thousands of Ugandans at a stroke of a pen.

But by widening the definition of corruption to absenteeism and environmental degradation the IGG is saying that corruption goes beyond stealing funds in the present to also the medium term effects of cutting work and the long term effects of environmental degradation.

The rich man who fills up the neighbourhood wetland today to build his apartment complex may not only be depriving the community of a water source today but is also causing flooding and its attendant effects on the community. The factory owner allowing untreated effluent into the lake is raising the cost of tap water and therefore denying poorer communities of safe drinking water. Cutting down trees to develop massive agricultural enterprises may contribute to climate changes that kick the ladder from under the poor. And on and on and on.

It is useful attempt to come to grips with the full extent of what constitutes corruption and hopefully then makes the fight against the vice more effective.

But it has been said before in this column that the fight against corruption will only begin to gather traction if we demonise to the point that the perpetrators are shirked like the man who defiles his infant daughter. There has to be social censure, we have to agree that this is a vice that affects us all even if the money is eaten in faraway Kampala...

As it is now our corrupt officials are given p[ride of place at Sunday service at our weddings and other functions. The message to all is that you have to take private advantage of your office wherever you are in order to be taken seriously in our society. Therein lies the problem.