KRA should tax everything but get the hell out of our beer

By PETER WANYONYI

It’s rough being an imbiber in Kenya these days. For a country that is supposedly liberal and a free-market economy, the powers that be have a decidedly frosty relationship with alcohol, that elixir of all time.

There is no other place in the sane world — Saudi Arabia and Iran are not sane places, so they don’t count — where the sins of a whole society are visited on what is just a relaxing drink, as happens in Kenya.

Kenya has crossed the threshold from being a sleepy little African hellhole, into being an expensive little African hellhole. The powers that be have decreed that everything — save for air, but not for long — must be taxed. Nothing is exempt. Gosh! Even food aid from overseas, sent in to help us feed our starving millions, attracts tax.

Nonsense

Kenyans eating roots and leaves in the dry and starving badlands east of the country will be looking on with chagrin as the Kenya Revenue Authority holds back hundreds of tonnes of food aid meant for them, pending payment of taxes by the donating countries. If they cannot pay tax on that aid, let them find another starving country to give their free food and free medicines. Kenya means business.

And it gets worse, much worse. It’s common wisdom that certain items — food, cooking gas, water, children’s clothes and the likes, are not required to pay Value Added Tax (VAT) the world over. But not in Kenya. Kenya is bravely blazing a lone trail in throwing such anachronistic nonsense out of the window.

If you can afford milk, you can afford the VAT slapped on it. Why should consumers not pay VAT on children’s clothes — who told them to have babies anyway? The country is seriously overpopulated — which is why we have starving masses in the first place — and VAT on kids’ formula and clothes will help stop people having so many babies. One simple VAT stone killing so many policy birds.

It follows, then, that government should allow at least one chink in its formidable VAT armour, a little respite for VAT-weary citizens to release their VAT-pressures out of. Traditionally, this has been booze.

No power

Nothing beats getting home in the evening after a day spent laboriously earning VAT for the government, and then sitting down to a VAT-free beer, right out of a bucket of cold water — the Kenyan’s fridge of choice, since in Kenya we get electricity only a tenth of the time, and the other nine tenths we are charged VAT for no power at all.

But the government, in its wisdom, knows no such exemptions. Booze, which helps people forget just how much they pay in taxes, is also taxed.

This is a shame. If everyone went to bed drunk, we wouldn’t make so many babies, so we wouldn’t need food aid. Our expenditure on HIV would be used for other matters, because drunks find it hard to copulate, with or without condoms. All that money would be spared — if only we had cheap booze to begin with!