“Was that a bad financial decision, or are you just a poor person being priced out of basic human pleasures?” – Ziziian

A Silent Violence

In the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, citing the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” The quote, like many theorists of capitalism and modern classical economists, emphasizes that tax is an integral part for funding services and development needed to support the functioning of a “civilized” state. But what does the term ‘civilized state’ mean when the majority of the population is forced to finance their own oppression, and in some cases, their own execution? What does it mean for public funds to be channeled into violent military operations at the expense of critical social services? For example, in Kenya, just last month as protestors took to the streets to mark the anniversary of the deadly 2024 demonstrations against the Finance Bill, during which the police and military used firearms on peaceful unarmed protestors, the response by Kenya’s Parliament was to revise the budget estimates to allocate an additional $100.43 million to the military while cutting funds for education and other social infrastructure.

We find ourselves tangled in the definition of a “civilised state” where ordinary working-class majority are taxed heavily to finance this narrative, while billionaires continue to hoard monies by benefitting from tax holidays and evasions while defining these as “creative accounting.” In such a state, we must ask, who is truly living on a tax discount and receiving handouts? Is it the person juggling three jobs just to make ends meet, or the self-proclaimed self-made billionaire who evades taxes and refuses to pay his employees a living wage? The myth of the hardworking, well-intentioned billionaire begins to unravel when we follow the money.

For centuries now, the global financial architecture has been a silent violence, often unnamed. It has been part of the enduring colonial legacy where global North countries exert their influence over the global South in order to loot and plunder resources, enabled and sanctioned by an exclusionary, undemocratic and unjust economic system, the tax system. In theory, the tax system should fund public goods and services, redistribute wealth to make accessible basic goods and services needed for life to flourish like health care, education, food, infrastructure, among others. However, the current tax system is one where the world’s poor pay more than the world’s richest 1%. It has become a tool of extraction and a reinforcement of inequality under the disguise of “development”. 

The One-Sided Social Contract

The philosophers of the social contract theory John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisioned taxes as part of a reciprocal contract between the state and its people where the state serves the public by redistributing resources for the common good. However, under the current architecture of white capitalism, no such contract exists. It is a one-sided contract where the state has largely abdicated its responsibility to serve the people and now merely acts as a broker for private and individualised interests, prioritizing profit-driven services over the provision of life-saving public needs. In a recent report by ActionAid International, it is revealed that austerity measures implemented over the past five years have led to a steep decline in public health and education. The chilling reality is that more than 75% of lower income countries dedicate a larger share of their budget to external debt servicing than to healthcare and over half of them spend more on debt repayment than on education.

This one-sided contract disproportionately affects women, girls and children through systematic deprivation of essential services like health, specifically maternal healthcare, food, and transport, all critical for their wellbeing. For the Global South, particularly Africa, the theory of a contract has been an illusion. The continent experienced a transition from direct colonial economic rule to a reconfigured system of exploitation dressed in international financial institutions, particularly the World Bank and IMF. The institutions’ role was to entrench, legitimize and sustain economic dominance by the global north through policy prescriptions dating back to the 1980s.  This was part of a post-colonial project designed to sustain white supremacist capitalism through widespread liberalization, deregulation and privatization.

Under this current financial architecture, government investment in public services declines while transferring the fiscal burden to structurally marginalized and already impoverished citizenry forced to shoulder the rising cost through higher and more regressive taxation. Healthcare, the bedrock of human survival, a non-negotiable service without which life cannot be sustained, has been turned into an exploitative industry. One where governments subsidize  large pharmaceutical corporations while emptying the pockets of patients who now carry the financial burden. Education, once hailed as a ladder to financial freedom, has become a debt engineering industry through student loans and exorbitant fees. Essential infrastructure such as roads has been cheapened into a bidding game for corporate interests under the guise of public-private partnerships and loan schemes. 

The social contract theory has not merely been breached, but it has been reversed. ‘The people’ now finance the welfare of the state rather than the state safeguarding and financing the welfare of the people. The theoretical role of taxation has been replaced by it being an instrument of societal control and economic discipline of an overly exploited race.

The Broken Promise of Taxation

Tax is a mandatory levy  enforced by law for the poor and working class, for whom consent is neither sought nor required by the state. The very system that promises to provide public services in return for tax contributions has stripped them of any real “good” under the crushing weight of austerity. However, this does not excuse the poor from paying; they continue to contribute, not out of choice, but because the system offers no reprieve or alternative.  Every paycheck hijacked by tax deductions, every essential item taxed becomes a forced investment into our own oppression. While taxes are framed as a tool to fund the collective welfare, in practice, more and more chunks of this revenue are being diverted to finance the war machines in an increasingly militarized world, to subsidize the private sector and shield the rich from paying their fair share of  taxes while there is hardly any budget for schools, hospitals or any mention of social protection.

Africa’s colonial Tax Collector

While colonial flags were lowered and independence flags hoisted to signal the end of colonialism and usher in the beginning of “political and economic sovereignty” across Africa, the tax collector never truly left. The architecture of colonial extraction remained firmly in place, enabling continued exploitation through economic systems designed to benefit the global North.  The structures of unequal exchange persist, wealth in the global North still dependent on the systematic appropriation of labor and resources from the Global South with drain totalling $242 trillion over the period of 1990 to 2015 alone. UNCTAD has also shown that Africa loses more than $88.6 billion every year to IFFs. This figure is even more daunting at a time where developing countries are estimated to face a global annual funding gap of USD 4 trillion to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 including $1.8 trillion for climate action. 

All the while, the majority of workers on the continent find themselves burdened with VAT on basic goods like food and medical products as high as 18%. The people in formal employment pay up over 30% of their formal salaries to the government in tax. Mobile money and social media taxes have also been imposed to discipline those in informal employment. And yet, big tech companies and MNCs are exempted under the disguise of not having a permanent address in the countries where their users are located.

Our Tax Liberation Vision

At its core, taxation should center care: for humanity, for equality, for dignity, for our shared responsibility towards a just and sustainable future. It should also center love for the people and our planet. In its truest form, taxation should redistribute wealth , fund public goods and services, and should repair the damage caused on the environment by industrialism. It should not serve as a means of accumulating obscene amounts of wealth or  building empires of capital powered by the exploitation of structurally marginalised people and the destruction of the planet. A truly progressive tax system must address the deep inequities that continue to allow the wealthiest individuals and corporations to contribute the least and it must reckon with the ecological costs of unchecked extraction. 

A just tax system should first restructure global tax governance in ways that put an end to continuous global tax abuse, eliminate all forms of Illicit Financial Flows, and  impose a minimum tax on wealth and corporate profits.  The establishment of a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNTC) presents a critical opportunity to advance a more just and equitable tax system. And a decolonial feminist approach to the UNTC moves us closer towards achieving this goal. However, this cannot be fully achieved without challenging the current global financial architecture as a whole.  The establishment of a UNTC offers a historic opportunity to restructure global tax rules in a way that is democratic, inclusive, transparent, and just while centering on the needs and voices of the global South, which has for far too long been drained of its wealth – rather than preserving a system built by and for former colonial powers. 

For Africa and the Global South, tax restructuring is more than policy change. It is a reclamation of our sovereignty as a people and continent. Therefore, justice demands that we undo the colonial foundations of our tax systems by taxing the rich instead of the poor, funding care instead of war, prioritizing human life over profit accumulation, and repairing centuries of human exploitation and environmental destruction. A just world is possible, but we must organize and push for a system that serves our liberation and not empires. We can not continue to finance our own oppression.

Authors: Precious Tricia Abwooli and Mworozi P. Kanywamate, Akina Mama wa Afrika