Zimbabwe Finance Minister laments he has no money to spend as $97 out of every $100 he gets goes to wages but he is not adopting South African rand

I do not want us in future to spend much more time talking about the situation. I am more conversant about the situation right across the board. What I would want us to do Madam Speaker, is to dwell more on what we can do to recover our economy, earn more money and revenue. Those ideas are not available. That is my primary mandate, but I would want us to spend more time dwelling on issues to do with what we can do to create businesses which pay taxes.

Another point Madam Speaker is that there does not seem to be a link from the contributions between taxes and service delivery. You cannot have your cake and eat it. If you do not want to be taxed, please do not shout and expect better service delivery. The problem we are encountering is that because of the informalisation of our economy, a lot of our people are in the informal sector. They do not want to pay taxes. Even those who are in the informal sector, rikanzi business ratorwa nemunhu mutema, totoziva kuti harichabhadhara tax.

We do not have that culture to link taxes to service delivery. If we want better education, health, roads and everything, we need to have the culture of paying taxes. When we all come here, everybody want the conditions to go up, allowances and everything and you tell me not to tax this and that, and not to touch this and that. Yet, you want all these good things. We need to understand. We cannot have all the things we want and then  protect sources of taxes from being taxed. There was a statement that we should not tax citizens. The citizens’ first obligation is to pay tax so that you can sustain your Government and Government is to sustain your service delivery in education, health, roads, etc.

So if you say citizens should not be taxed, who is going to be taxed? I cannot tax foreigners. I have to tax nationals and whoever has income and wherever I see is a source of income, I zero in to tax and raise the money. I think we need to understand that. Let me now respond to the contributions which were made by Hon. Members. I will just touch on those contributions which I believe were not a repetition.

Hon. Nduna who spoke yesterday urging integrating computerisation. I support him fully. This is an exercise that we have mandated the Ministry of Home Affairs to undertake so that the police, ZINARA, ZIMRA and CVR are integrated so that when you get to a police road block, that computer at the police road block should tell the policeman that in the past, you infringed and you did not pay the fine. It should tell that you have previous convictions of negligence.  That is the direction that we are going. To do that, it is a process. I want to say to Hon. Nduna that it is an issue that we are looking at and it will also help to stop leakages in revenue collection. It will also go a long way to fight corruption because everything will be computerised.

Hon. Majome only stood up to make a point of order which she then said to me that she was mistaken, that I did not have power to change the levels of fines. Wherever money is being paid, it is paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund and the Minister of Finance has a right to reduce or to increase. If you deny the Minister of Finance that power, then he has no basis to be the Minister of Finance. So I want to make that clear.

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