Opinions of Thursday, 21 July 2016

Columnist: Amenuti Narmer

African Union imposes its first tax on Africans

27th African Union Summit in Kigali 27th African Union Summit in Kigali

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” ~ Modibo Mohammed Al Kaburi.

What is the African Union (AU) but a collection of African Heads of States, many of whom lack the full mandate (if any) of their people.

What is the African Union but a rag-thug organization of elite Africans, spoon-fed by aid dollars, who travel, collect and chop per diem at the behest of the poor tax payers in their respective countries? What really is the African Union but a defunct organization that takes orders from special interest groups from western nations – that like to see Africans wallow in poverty – and refuses to recognize Haiti as a truly African nation?

This proposal to impose a tax on Africans by a collection of elites, who are without the mandate of the people of Africa, is a kidnapping of the utmost monstrous proportion.

There is no time in the history of man, except for a hijacking of a whole continent – which until now has never happened – when a select few have single-handedly decided to force a hefty landmass of people, an entire continent the size of Africa, to pay taxes.

It is unprecedented that an organization no one ever voted into office would sit somewhere out of sight and impose taxes on citizens.

Who are these miscreants?

On Monday, 18 July 2016 in Kigali, the buffoonery of the Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union organization was exposed. Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma welcomed a “groundbreaking decision” of the Assembly to institute a levy of 0.2 percent on eligible imports into Africa, in order to address the funding challenges that the organization has faced since its inception.

Funding challenges?

How about levying taxes on the platitude of foreign mining companies that siphon billions of dollars each year from the continent? How about levying taxes on the multitude of Multinational Corporations operating inside Africa for basically free and without any accountability to African people and communities?

How about protecting African resources and using them to fund sustainable development? How about ridding African government of corruption? How about many other common sense approaches to obtaining money?

And if all else fails, how about dismantling the AU so that they would no longer have to worry about funding an organization that is of no use to African communities?

Somehow in the most warped of minds, the organization’s leaders reckon that by selling this tax to the Heads of State as a levy on imports to fund and operationalize a certain Peace Fund most folks would buy the rap. They claim this money would be used to finance peace and security operations throughout the continent.

They hope to collect some 65 million dollars from each of the continent’s five regions per year, increasing this tax collection to some 80 million dollars per region by the year 2020. However, this might just be the beginning.

An 80 million dollars tax collection campaign is only enough to finance just 25 percent of the cost of African Union peace support operations. Invariably, the taxes must go up sometime later.

Meanwhile, none of the contracts for peace keeping equipment – to operationalize this Peace Fund – go to African companies. The uniforms, the guns, the bullets, the vehicles, the rations for soldiers and the medicines are all imported into Africa. Essentially, the African Union’s goal to tax the African poor to pay for these items and the operations that come with them is a clear case of robbing poor Peter to pay a gluttonous Paul.

That means taxes are here to haunt the existence of the African again. This time they are not from a central government within the same country. This time, they arise from a phantom organization without the mandate of the African. This time, the African has no stake in its imagination, its formation, its administration. This time, the entity set to collect taxes from fellow Africans is worse than an occupying colonial power.

The proposed mandate is a flesh-eating tariff akin to domestic enslavement.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but have we unknowingly formed a continental government for the people of Africa? Have we come to surreptitiously vote a government, a vote that no one outside of the special elite recalls? Can we the people hold the African Union responsible and accountable in case we don’t see our tax currencies at work?

Of course not!

This is solely a tax imposition on an already highly indebted citizenry. Already African nations have incredibly high tax rates that are hurting the poor more than they provide social amenities to ease their pain. This African Union’s organization tax can only add to the prices of basic commodities in African countries and make life even more difficult for the ordinary citizen.

The question that many interested folks have asked is: why the absence of referendums in Africa on such important matters? Wouldn’t it be more expedient to bring such decisions to national parliaments where they can be subjected to popular votes?

Obviously referendums and voting by the people would provide fairness and actual democracy to the process. But as a rag-thug organization, as a collection of shaitans, coons and reprobates, the African Union knows only one place to seek rent: from the people. So the ordinary citizens of Africa must submit to their unelected heads and dish out a 0.2 percent import tax to satisfy the lazy whims and caprices of an organization without legs for the good, but with hooves for the ugly.

Of course not! Do not be fooled, hoodwinked, or bamboozled. What the African Union proposes is a rent-seeking machination of neo-imperialism.

The size of this monstrosity that is calling itself the African Union stretches into nightmarish territory, reaching perilously far beyond what it is mandated to do. If it is not stopped, if this monster is not checked, tracked, caught and killed, it will escape and wreak havoc of enlightening chaos upon the poor of Africa.

The African Union is not working in the interest of African people. It is an organization worth routing out. Long after they were imagined, Nkrumah’s dreams have since morphed into a Frankenstein organization. Clearly this is an organization overtaken by western special interests. Its ideas are capitalist and neoliberal at best.

There’s absolutely nothing to write home to grandmother about the collection of buffoons, demons and anti-African elitists that call themselves the African Union.

The AU is an organization that is now reaching far beyond its calling; it is a leadership without portfolio; it is a union without a mandate; it is a makeshift government without a referendum to back it; it is a dictatorship.

If it is not reigned in; if it is allowed to grow – and taxation of the African poor is the way it will accomplish this – it will breed and it will morph into an atrocious anathema to our freedoms. Africa cannot allow another horrendous chapter in her illustrious history, no matter how torrid.

An AU reaching far and wide into the lives of individual Africans by the way of taxation, is beyond its calling; it spells a coup de grace for the continent. It must be disbanded and the foul ideas banished. The AU shaitans must be rooted out before they kill all of us!