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{
    "id": 846637,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/846637/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 164,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Dagoretti South, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Kiarie",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13322,
        "legal_name": "John Kiarie Waweru",
        "slug": "john-kiarie-waweru"
    },
    "content": " Thank you very much, Hon. Speaker. I want to join my colleagues in congratulating you on your election as a Chairman of CPA. I had my time to prosecute one of the issues that I wanted to bring up and I had weighed in on my two cents worth on issues to do with Proposal No.58. The long and the short of it is that I was against the repealing of the interest rate capping. Today, I would want to focus my attention on a proposal captured on Clause 31 where it says that the First Schedule of the Excise Duty Act 2015 is amended. Of particular interest to me is paragraph 5 which proposes that Excise Duty on fees charged for money transfer services by banks, money transfer agencies and other financial service providers shall be ten per cent of the excisable value. I would like to request Members to support an amendment that I want to bring to the House that has been approved, where I argue that this excise duty cannot be all loaded to Wanjiku. As we speak, the amount of money moved on mobile money transfer platforms is in excess of Kshs3.7 trillion. To put it in perspective, that is close to over half of Kenya’s GDP which is around Kshs7 trillion. I would like to let this House know that even the CBK Governor is on record as saying that mobile money transfer has become the tail that wags the dog. This has come with very handsome profits. As we all know, one of the operators, who is currently enjoying close to 80 per cent dominance in the money transfer business, is declaring massive profits. As of March 2018, we all know that Safaricom declared profits in excess of Kshs55 billion. My argument is that the mobile network operators can afford to carry the burden of this Excise Duty instead of loading it on Wanjiku who is a struggling Kenyan. If you look at the trends of how credit has been sold to Wanjiku in Kenya; you remember that credit used to be in denominations of Kshs1,000. It came down to Kshs500, Kshs250, all the way down to Kshs10 and even a Bamba Tano, meaning that Wanjiku herself is struggling. My proposal is that if we are going to put excise duty on mobile money transfer, then it should be shared at 70 per cent by the mobile network operator or the mobile money transfer platform and 30 per cent by Wanjiku. The proposal here is that Excise Duty on fees charged for money transfer services by banks, money transfer agencies and other financial service providers shall be 10 per cent of excisable duty hence my proposal that out of this 10 per cent, Wanjiku should carry only 30 per cent, which would add up to around 3 per cent of the excise duty proposed here, and 7 per cent should be carried by the mobile platform. Given that I do not have much time to prosecute this, I would like to end by saying that the mobile network operators in Kenya make profits out of Wanjiku’s pockets. As such, the mobile network providers should not find it hard to share the burden of these duties that we are adding here with Wanjiku. We would not want to preside over a situation where we have entities that make obscene profits in a country where most people live below the poverty line; living on under a dollar a day. Gandhi once spoke about the seven deadly sins of human beings and one of them was commerce without morality. We would not want to be in a situation where we have corporations operating to just get profits out of Kenyans, while conducting commerce without morality. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}