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{
    "id": 1003323,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1003323/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 407,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Seme, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Dr.) James Nyikal",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 434,
        "legal_name": "James Nyikal",
        "slug": "james-nyikal"
    },
    "content": "On Income Tax, it exhibits the contradiction we have. We have a big Budget and still we do not want to overtax our people because they are burdened. It is good there is the lower level of taxation which has been removed and raised so that many people are removed from the tax bracket. That is a good thing that I support. Increasing the limit for payment on rental income so that people pay a little less is something good. I support it. But at the same time, we are removing the incentives for home owners. As I was saying, we are on the one hand giving and on the other taking from people. The worst bit of it was the proposal to tax pensioners. How can you do that in a country with a social protection policy that is trying and putting a lot of money to support vulnerable people then you take people who are near vulnerable and you start taxing them? You are increasing the number of vulnerable people. The Committee did a good job on that issue of taxing pensions. On relieving people on Value Added Tax, you again see the contradiction. You zero-rate bread but you leave out unga. How can you do that? Maybe they were thinking that people will get more unga, you get bread, but you will get your tax from the unga. That is the one we should have looked at. Again, I agree with the Committee that is something we should look at. It is good they zero-rated some inputs like corn seed in agriculture. That is okay. In the health sector, I cannot agree more with the previous Member. We were surprised in the Departmental Committee on Health. I thought we attempted to remove taxes on the inputs of health commodities some time back. How can we tax health commodities and at the same time talk of universal health coverage? That is contradictory. It is good on the ambulances but it is a small contribution. In fact, if we can, we should look at that schedule and just see. I do not have much time but we would have looked at all the health inputs. That is the first step in reducing the cost of healthcare. On the EPZ, getting some of those products in the domestic market is good. It improves the local market. It improves the labour that we have locally. The other thing I noticed is, if you look at the products from the EPZ, you cannot believe they are made in this country. If we bring some in, I think it will improve the quality of our input. There is no way we can get away from the digital services tax. I support it. Some colleagues were saying this is where the young people are but, all economy is moving to the digital space. With this COVID-19 you have seen even getting food into your home, you order it digitally. Where are we going to get tax if we leave this out? We can just look at the rates but that is the direction. We cannot get that out. On CSR, well, I think giving them tax relief is good. The danger is that they will end up exaggerating the amount of money they put into CSR to avoid taxation. It is generally a good thing if we work out details to avoid graft. I did not want to say much but let me just say one thing: If we collect all these taxes and do not fight graft, we are wasting time. If you look at our figures, 30 per cent of our taxes go into graft. Our deficit is also 30 per cent; Kshs804 billion out of Kshs2.7 trillion is one-third. If we could just eliminate graft, we would not have a deficit. With those remarks, I support the Finance Bill."
}