Don’t tax us or offer services

On October 20 this year, Liz Truss announced her resignation as the UK Prime Minister.

She had only been UK’s Prime Minister for 45 days and her resignation came as a result of an economic crisis and the political chaos that followed afterwards.

At the centre of the economic crisis were her proposed tax cuts that some sections deemed aggressive, senseless and ill-timed.

However, in her policy speech at the Conservative Party conference on October 5, she said: “Cutting taxes is the right thing to do morally and economically”.

She highlighted that governments spend people’s money when they collect taxes to finance this and that, and hence, she came up with a two-pronged argument.

First, it is only moral not to take away too much, in the form of taxes, from someone who has worked hard for their money.

Second, it is economically sensible having the one who has worked hard for their money to decide how best to use it. Basically, her idea was to keep more money in people’s pockets.

Coming back home, Malawians have consistently been hearing stories of massive mismanagement, misallocation, plunder, and theft of public resources.

If it is not the government losing millions of public money in weird and suspicious fertiliser procurement deals, then it is truckloads of maize bought with public money missing at Admarc and the National Food Reserve Agency. Unfortunately, all this is happening amid persistent allegations of corruption involving politicians and public servants.  

The most unfortunate thing, however, is that there seems to be no serious commitment from our political leadership to address mismanagement, misallocation and theft of public resources. 

Now one wonders: is our country’s leadership capable of managing our public resources?

For starters, it seems that our leaders choose to forget that they are just mere custodians of our public resources.

Ideally, they ought to spend our taxes and public borrowings on causes that serve the best interests of the citizenry.

However, what we have mostly seen is the complete opposite.

Truth be told, the citizenry expects our political leadership to be spending public money  on things that would improve the citizens’ livelihoods.

However, the way that our leaders have continuously abused our public resources, one would only begin to understand the reason the country remains underdeveloped.  

For instance, do we deserve to be struggling with basic necessities like food, medical drugs, potable water, electricity, quality education and forex in the 21st century?

It is common knowledge that our leaders have fallen short of using our public resources in ways that make sense both morally and economically in citizens’ eyes.

They have not spent or invested in meaningful things that ought to improve the livelihood of the suffering masses.

Instead, all we see is a few individuals, their family members and their associates living opulent lifestyles off public resources, including our taxes and borrowings.

At this point, one would ask: Has the citizenry that has worked so hard to raise money for the government in the form of taxes, really seen the benefit of their taxes?

In her speech at the Conservative Party conference, ex-PM Truss asserted that money in people’s pockets is one good measure of progress and growth of any country. Now, our question is: is Malawi any close to a progressing society?

From the foregoing discussion, one can safely conclude that maybe governments, especially those that are synonymous with mismanagement and theft of public resources like ours, have a moral duty to lift off the burden of taxes from its citizens and let them have their hard-earned money in their pockets to improve their livelihoods.