The angry response by Kenyans towards the 1.5% housing tax, not a levy of course is just another orchestra matrix by the Jubilee government to steal the last coins remains in already financially starved Kenyans. The anger not only emanates from the suspicion that the monies will be lost in the now ordinary corruption means, wait, did I say ordinary? Yes nowadays in Kenya corruption is ordinal! But the fine price of the levy mismanagement I just 10,000Ksh or two years jail term. The fine itself is a clear demonstration of intent to embezzle the funds, since such fines are ridiculous. Well, I am not here to say who will be mentioned in the scandal but we already have Francis Atwoli, already says some individuals wanted the levy to remain 1.5% even when the president was willing to bring it down to a whopping 0.5%.
Currently the country has approximately 20million employed people. However, over 80 percent of these people have a basic salary of less than 100,000Ksh. So if we argue statistically that the total amount collected per employee in average is 1000Ksh a month and a similar amount from the employer we will definitely have overrated the monthly levy collections. Its however not bad to overestimate, may be by doing so a clear picture is illustrated. This means that a total of 40billion will be collected monthly. A comfortable class house with three or four bedroom costs 8 to may be 14million depending on locations and style. So let be generous and take an average of 10 million per house. That’s gives us an average of 4 thousand houses a month.
Now, let us deviate from these calculations since we know a house cannot be built in a month. We need a minimum of seven months to finalize a house, but here we can assume 6 months, of course its normal for us to already enter the house as the final touches are being done, that’s what makes us Kenyans. So in six months we expect the government to have built 24 thousand houses. Due to the obvious slow nature of the government, just like all government all over the world, and by the fact that the money has to pay salaries to be managed, of course who do you expect to manage all that money without getting a pay, the final possible houses after 6 months will just be a mere 20 thousand houses. Now the jubilee government has only five half year terms as from July 2019, and therefore the total number of possible houses to be constructed by the time politics get hot and everything comes to a standstill will just be 100 thousand houses. Well, we know for sure this is one of the big four agendas of Jubilee, by big four I mean we have to subject it to a legacy measure!
Well, google could not give me a quantitative google measure, but I am also a mathematician and I deal with numbers in my profession so I am allowed to define such a term mathematically and have the community accept it. In no uncertain terms, since this is the first mathematical definition of a measure of legacy, I would also like to mention some few assumptions, one is that people retires every day, and also people get hired sometimes in Kenya. This means that buy the time 2022 comes we will have the total number of people having contributed to the levy being approximately 25 million. I will also hold inflation constant, even in these times when the Kenyan shilling is sending shockwave to importers, more so those who never stock enough foreign currencies in their accounts. To keep the story short, let us take a simple approach, what its 100 thousand houses for a total 25 million people paying tax levy? This leads to just 0.4% of those who will have their accounts slashed the levy by then. Even if I were to baptize the 0.4% to 4 percent it is not near the terms of what Jubilee want to call a legacy. The whole thing should be abandoned and a policy to regulate land prices, developed. In addition the government should also subsidize the taxation of construction materials instead.
By Ngei Katumo, Germany
