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Government Targets Non-Religious Organizations with New Tax Scheme

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Our very creative and innovative government has devised ways to tax organizational temperament. A government infamous for crafting laws that shield aliens from contributing to our puny Exchequer kit is now after anybody who is organizing to improve their miserable lot. This article excoriates the government for ill intentions of killing the goose that has not yet begun laying golden eggs and projects that, like taxing satellite and television screens, the enforcement costs of collecting this tax will lead to its abandonment.

The government says non-religious organisations of ten people or more will need to register with them and pay a one-time application fee of 50,000/= Tshs, a registration fee of 100,000/= Tshs, and an annual fee of 50,000/= Tshs. The government targets non-religious organizations with economic clout so that she can milk them dry!

The government claims that all those fees amounting to 200,000/= Tshs will offer incredible services at their disposal. The registered non-religious organisations will bring constitutions, names of the members, names of their leaders, photographs and their qualifications. The government that has failed to arraign theft, looting and embezzlement of public funds now boasts she will help clean up such vices in these organisations!

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History Rebukes the Government

When the government intervenes in managing private organizations, our collective experience tells us she comes as a destroyer. Nothing good comes from the government. Everything the government touches turns into ashes and brimstone. Even when thieves are arraigned in court, the government loots those organizations by confiscating property and money without compensating the victims!

When the DECI scheme was confronted, more than 2 billion Tshs were seized by the government, and to date, not a single cent has been restored to the real victims. This is how our government protects its people by inflicting a second injustice on the victims. In a comparative scenario, when the US arrested the owners of the pyramid scheme TELEXFREE, the American Court ordered the money be returned to its true owners. Tanzanian courts jubilantly handed over the money to the government that contributed nothing to that bootleg!

Before the government entered the cooperative movement, everything was great. Still, after that, the cooperative movement somersaulted into an ICU with no chance of recovery, leaving members in a dire state of poverty.

How can a government that is notorious for thieving, looting, mismanagement of public funds now all of a sudden become our saviour? Even private companies such as the issuer of UNIT TRUST shares registered with Capital Markets, this government did not offer any help as leaders made illegal procurement decisions that emptied the members’ kit.

The government never charged the leaders with criminal cases for flouting the Procurement Act and helping themselves billions without the authorization of their general assembly. Since the government condoned UNIT TRUST theft and looting by inaction, she emboldened the leaders to fight in court for reinstatement of their positions to keep doing whatever they were doing before being disrupted.

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Good News on the Horizon.

The history of collecting harsh and unconscionable taxes offers us a reason for brimming with optimism. This tax will have a cautionary tale to tell. Those non-religious organizations with reputable means will have no way but to register and get themselves ensnared in this government exploitation scheme.

These organizations will likely be collecting or earning serious cash, have bank accounts, or have registered memberships with mobile microfinance companies such as M-KOBA and M-PESA. The bigger you are, the less mobility and flexibility you have, which is your vulnerability.

Over the years, the government, whose record is to raise taxes to subsidize official graft that keeps snowballing, is expected to hike these taxes ten times or more in the next decade. Before we know it, most of these well-to-do organizations will either fold, go under, or transform themselves into ghost organizations to evade government intrusion to their survival lifeline.

However, a smaller guy can ignore this fiat, and the government enforcement costs will be too high, and that is good news. Remember the TV registration fee, annual fee and the like? Taxman threatened retaliatory actions against tax dodgers, but everyone ignored him even after an intractable registration.

Satellites were coiled in this extraction scheme by the government, despite targeting anybody who was doing well. Doing well economically is perceived as challenging the regime in power!

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The more you analyze our taxation policies, the more you can see the aim is to enrich aliens and punish us for being loyal citizens. If the government were overzealous with the aliens the way they squeeze us to our deathbeds, this country would have been an economic superpower two decades ago.

But poverty is the cudgel of restraining us on the leash. The poorer we are, the more we bow our heads and kneel our left knee to the government so that we can pick crumbs that fall on her high table.

The proliferation of ‘Chawa’ – lice is a point in hand. Humans who were created in the image of the Almighty God have forsaken their eternal blessings and transformed themselves into an image of a creeping and crawling insect whose survival is a parasitic relationship with the host. It is not even a “symbiotic association” but a master-servant relationship! That is how low our government has subjected us.

Every tax policy has one intent: fleece our own lest they become a political force to challenge us!

The author is a Development Administration specialist in Tanzania with over 30 years of practical experience, and has been penning down a number of articles in local printing and digital newspapers for some time now.

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Pius pius lemi
Pius pius lemi
7 months ago

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I liked the first three paragraphs, artistic, humus and truth blended together. Your amazing

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