This introductory text co-authored by three prominent scholars in the field provides a useful overview of some of the thorny questions that emerge on taxation and its relationship to the quality of governance on the continent. With actionable bullet points in each chapter, it targets policymakers in African countries, international aid agencies and activists. With these audiences in mind, the book is principally concerned with how African governments can raise additional revenue efficiently and, inasmuch as it is possible, equitably.
For instance, the authors assertively grapple with the potentially enormous tax receipts that could be obtained from multinational corporations and high net worth individuals on the continent. The latter include people whose ‘value’ is US$1 million or more. Both types of taxpayers are known for their skill at shirking their fair tax responsibilities, which the text details. This is no small feat given the legal complexities of both entities, their strong embeddedness in the international system, and the myriad ways in which their considerable wealth can be hidden. The text also pays careful attention to clarifying tax jargon such as value added tax, ‘regressive’ taxes and so forth. And, where possible, the book also raises concerns about gender and tax.
But there are at least three interconnected gaps within the text, which loosely stem from the ways in which the authors breezily draw from or neglect historical literature. The first is the missed opportunity to identify or meaningfully illustrate how deeply intertwined multinational tax avoidance is to the political economy of many African states today. For instance, some contemporary multinational companies grew alongside – or, in the case of Rhodesia, reasonably constituted – the state in many African countries. In a pattern that eerily resembles the template for multinational tax avoidance on the continent today, colonial-era corporations, such as Unilever's antecedent, were often granted privileged access in exchange for funnelling rents back to their European metropoles. In a sense, corporations might have co-produced Frederick Cooper's ‘gatekeeper state’ phenomena in ways that persist, and future efforts to ‘fix’ how multinational corporations are taxed will likely need to grapple with this legacy if they are to be lasting.
Second, although the authors state that the legacy of European occupation of most of Africa remains alive for people on the continent, they fail to consider how colonial tax policies reworked local forms of public authority in ways that remain salient today. This includes Sierra Leone's 1898 Hut Tax War, in which approximately 1,000 soldiers, traders and missionaries were killed in resistance to the imposition of a tax on people's homes. The memory of this nine-month rebellion is, in the authors’ estimation, ‘a significant influence on how [Sierra Leoneans] understand the world today’. And yet one consequence of this uprising that the authors neglect was that chiefs ended up collecting these taxes on behalf of government and in turn ‘exploited’ their positions as tax collectors to their own advantage.
Today, the collection of a variety of informal taxes by customary authorities, often in the peripheries rather than the urban parts of African countries, remains a fact of life for many people on the continent. As a result, there is a patchwork of direct tax regimes throughout many African countries, which might in turn inform a broad spectrum of ideas of citizenship, the state, and how the state relates to different types of people. For instance, it is entirely plausible that people in parts of Sierra Leone's peripheries prefer the ‘decentralized despotism’ of chiefs and other traditional authorities, to paraphrase Mahmood Mamdani, to that of the state. And, these informal tax collection practices in different parts of African states might serve a myriad of other socio-political functions that governments or aid agencies fail to adequately appreciate, let alone stamp out. For instance, recent historical research on West African boundaries and state making highlights some of the ways in which taxes shape how armed groups and criminal networks within the peripheries operate (P. Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-making in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2019)).
The other, related, critique of the authors’ limited attention to historical detail centres on the complex ways in which Western scholars have dictated how African governments should levy taxes to finance local governments. In British-occupied Africa, Frederick Lugard and Margery Perham – influential thinkers on British colonial administration – provided explanations for how taxes were meant to become the heart of local governments. Taxes were considered essential for ‘civilizing’ customary authorities who would then teach their people the value of the state. Indeed, Margery Perham advanced the idea that taxes should be levied to get Africans to ‘acknowledge’ the state as the supreme authority. Tellingly, the French anthropologist Michel Leiris noted that obtaining taxes was in fact colonialism's ‘chief preoccupation’ (quoted in W. H. Worger, N. L. Clark and E. A. Alpers, Africa and the West: a documentary history. Volume 2 (Oxford University Press, 2010)). The final chapter's focus on ‘new organisational systems, collaboration among government agencies, and the effective socialising and disciplining of staff’ in African public administrations to get better at taxes unintentionally echoes these types of efforts.
Given that the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been defined by gross disparities within African countries and between Africa and the rest of the world, taxes remain one of the most revolutionary tools for building fairer countries. This text is a useful starting point for understanding how to rebuild the current system, even if it unexpectedly raises unanswered questions about the ‘real politics’ of taxation, multinational tax avoidance and state formation on the continent.
