President Yoweri Museveni |
Uganda’s major telecom operators, including the
local division of South Africa’s MTN Group, will commence implementation of a new government tax on
social media accounts before they can access them.
This follows the passage of Excise
Duty (Amendment) Bill, 2018 by Uganda’s parliament which introduced new taxes
on use of so called Over The Top (OTT) services:
communications platforms offered over the traditional telecom networks
.
They include popular social media
platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Yahoo Messenger,
Instagram, YouTube, Skype and others. The tax is supposed to come
in with the 2018/19 (July-June) financial year and each user is supposed to pay
a flat fee of 200 shillings ($0.0516) per day.
A joint press release from
MTN, Bharti Airtel and Africell, said that from July 1 OTT services can be
accessed on payment of the OTT tax by the customer.
Payment will be via the three
telecom firms’ mobile money platforms. Customers will then be granted access to
the platforms if they already have data on their devices.
Tax
to be implemented despite criticism
Critics of the new law had
argued that taxing social media would amount to restrictions on freedoms of
expression on the internet while taxing mobile money
transactions would hurt low income earners who had found solace in the
services, after mainstream banks failed to reach them with suitable services. It
will potentially hike the cost of data in a country where per capita income
stands at about $600.
Data costs in Africa are
already among the world’s highest, according to digital advocacy group World
Wide Web Foundation.
Of Uganda’s 41 million
people, 23.6 million are mobile phone subscribers and 17 million use the
internet, according to state-run Uganda Communications Commission.
Opposition politicians voiced
their reservations on the benefits of taxing the poor, in the name of revenue
collection. Many argued that government should instead focus on tackling
corruption to optimize the use of available government resources.
‘‘We are losing money to
corruption yet we want to tax the poor who are trying to survive. I don’t want
to be part of the parliament that strangles the life out of Ugandans, ‘’said
Katusabe Godfrey, a legislator from the biggest opposition party in Uganda
.
On its part, the Government has argued that the needs of
poor Ugandans had been considered and that the revenue collected from the new
taxes would be used to provide services like ‘free education, free healthcare
and free roads’ that are demanded by the citizenry.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Disclaimer: Comment expressed do not reflect the opinion of African Parliamentary News