How has the social media tax impacted on people with disabilities?

“When legislating, let’s make policies that affect everyone fairly. The disabled in this case were not well thought of.”
– Mugisa Robert(NUDIPU).

On the 12th day of March, 2018, the president wrote a letter to the minister of finance pointing  out that there was need for a tax to curb on gossip that had escalated on social media sites. He also said that it would help raise over 1 trillion annually in revenue and every one using the “over the top” services like Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram would be required to pay 200 shillings daily to access the services. Also, the mobile money tax was introduced and a 1% charge would be put on every transaction though it’s in the process of being reduced to 0.5%.

However, these taxes have been widely criticized with many issues being raised right from the mode of payment, aspects of double taxation, and misuse of revenue by the government in extravagant expenditure.
The challenges that have been faced since the inception of these two taxes have stretched even to the side of revenue collection where a significant drop has been registered in the taxes collected from these two services. The best possible alternative would be banking but the people in rural areas have issues accessing these institutions.

In the tax debate at this year’s festival, a patent question was raised: “How has the social media tax impacted on people with disabilities?” Following the discussions from the panelists and the attendees, it was noted that a number of people with disabilities use social media platforms to ease communication like for the  case of the deaf. The implementation of this tax has not only made communication hard for them but also hardened the access to onlillne education material. Most citizens agree that paying taxes is good for a county’s development but the nature of tax and its reception by the public matters too. Also, the persons with
disabilities felt that their freedom of expression was disregarded by the people who drafted the bill.

Going forward, it was suggested that the government should make a consideration to review this tax and pay attention to the impact of this tax on people with special needs given the difficulties they face and also make efficient allocation of resources to priority sectors  that will bring services closer to such persons not forgetting the need to source for more alternative tax generating avenues.