The Ugandan government has announced that it plans to introduce a social media tax for those of her citizen making use of social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and others.
According to Uganda’s minister of Finance, the soon to be imposed tax is meant to boost the country’s revenue, national security and help in boosting the country’s electricity.
“We ‘re looking for money to maintain the security of the country and extend electricity so that you people can enjoy more social media, more often, more frequently,” Uganda’s Minister of Finance, Matia Kasaija said.
The Finance explained that the government will levy every social media user in the country which might amount to 200 Ugandan shillings (about $0.027) per day. It is worth to note that Uganda’s mobile phone subscriber’s stands at 23.6 million, and it is still unclear how the government plans to carry this out. Questions like; how the government plans to monitor social media apps installed on those subscribers device, how it plans to enforce etc still lies unanswered.
Uganda is known for creating policies that never gets implemented. Some time ago last year, the Ugandan government said that it had placed an order for the purchase of a “p0rn detection machine” to combat the viewing of p0rnographic materials by its citizen. Nothing, however, happened afterwards the announcement was made.
Early this year, the Ugandan government announced that it was launching its own social media platforms – like their own version of WhatsApp and Twitter. However, none of these social media sites announced by the government ever saw the daylight.
With the previous failed results, it won’t come as a surprise that this move to levy tax on social media users in the country will fail or might never be implemented in the first place at all. The soon to be introduced tax is expected to be implemented in July 2018.
While we look at Uganda, another east African country, Tanzania, has signed into law a social media and blogging regulation that requires all content creators to pay a compulsory $900 registration and license fees.