Another About Turn

Here we go again! Yet another turn-around on the SPUP-SPPF-SPP merry-go-round started since 1977! Abolish this, abolish that, in the quest to forge a new country with revolutionary vision for a prosperous future!
Three decades later, the revolutionary fervour has long dimmed, the prosperous future a promise that remains somewhere out there, always out of reach and the country has just about made a complete about-face in politics, education, health, social welfare, transportation, business, housing, economy, etc. to be where it was before the revolutionaries started messing things up.
The latest turn around due will be Personal Income Tax.
That very beast that was put to death in 1987, as part of the revolutionary zeal to ease the burden on the country’s suffering population!!
Obviously, the 1987 Income Tax abolition was accompanied with the inevitable personal salary down-sizing across the board in both public and private sectors, and merrily joined the ranks of all the other indirect taxes that cummulated to drive the average family finances to and through the ground.
22 years later, in the Seychelles Nation daily of 10th June, we read that a personal income tax will be introduced from 2010 as part of the new 2010-2013 tax reform, itself part of the November 2008 Economic reform.
Introduced? Like in ‘it-wasn’t-there, you-guys-never-knew-or-experienced-it, before?” Those wallahs got it wrong! It was there from the first years of settlement in the islands until 1987!
The proposed Tax Reform is just another of those vital bits of information that somehow failed to find a suitable place in the SPPF's 2006 –2011 presidential election program. This in itself is all rather unfortunate. What makes it worse is that we, as a people, gobble it all up with little protest at being so misled and taken for granted!!