ZIMRA’s Intention to Tax Vendors Unfair

Misheck Shambare

Opinion

For vendors in the country, it never rains but it pours.

Recently the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) announced that it was going to descend on vendors and force them to pay tax from $2-$5 per day.

Vendors who usually play cat and mouse games with the city council inspectors and the Zimbabwe Republic Police while selling at undesignated points now have to contend with the national taxman.  

Given the meager profits they make from their vending, this new move by ZIMRA is bound to make their trade much leaner.

The question that emerges is how can Zimra tax vendors who are already struggling with life with ever continuing deterioration of our economy.

With media reports that Zimra has failed to meet its revenue target for the first half of the year owing to the current liquidity crunch and company closures, collecting tax from vendors can only be seen as a measure of desperation by the authority.

Zimra would be better placed plugging loopholes in its own heavily porous internal systems.

Let’s take for instance that the authority is responsible for collecting all the taxes at all border posts in the country.  It is a service that it is not doing so well due to their system which is regularly criticized on the basis of allegations of corruption.

Most goods that enter the country are some of them pass through the boarders without even paying the customs duty because of people within the system of Zimra who are heavily shady.

I once travelled to South Africa where I needed to buy some items for my family and on my way back the bus was loaded with several goods purchased by people there. Instead of the Zimra authority to come and do his duties at the bus they just instructed the driver to come with their amount which I did not think was equivalent to all the goods that were in the bus.

As for me I only paid a quarter of the money of the goods that I did purchase from South Africa through the loopholes.

As a result a lot of revenue was lost because the bus was loaded with cross boarder traders because of incompetence of the Zimra officials.

One cross boarder trader who was on the bus exposed that this has become the way of their life that they will just approach the driver and make him pay their duty through dappled means as this will benefit them in the long run of their business.

In the end many people are finding it easier to do their shopping outside the country. In fact many people when they think of buying clothes or house hold furniture they will just cross the border and buy there because it will be cheaper. In its place of Zimra promoting the “Buy Zimbabwe” campaign they are letting it down.