In Shaming “Vampire States”, Marian Tupy says, “The callousness of African leaders often beggars belief”:
An acquaintance of mine used to be a U.S. diplomat. Among the tasks he was given during his diplomatic career was to negotiate the delivery of American food aid with the Southern Sudanese rebel leader John Garang. For much of the period between 1962 and 2004, Sudan was engaged in a bloody civil war between the Arabs in the north of the country and Christians in the south. Millions of people lost their lives and many more were starving.My acquaintance sought Garang’s permission for the United States to commence the food relief operation. After much negotiation, Garang graciously agreed to have his people fed courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. He then demanded to know how much of an import tariff he could impose on the U.S. food aid without irking the American government.
I had no idea that they taxed medical supplies:
In a recent paper entitled “Taxed to Death,” Roger Bate, Richard Tren and Jasson Urbach from a non-governmental organization called Africa Fighting Malaria, estimated the amount of taxes that governments of some of the world’s poorest countries impose on imports of medicines from overseas. In 2005, the authors found, the combined value of the import tariff and value added tax on foreign medicines was 38 percent in Kenya, 36.2 percent in Tanzania, 31 percent in Uganda and 28 percent in Nigeria. In Zimbabwe, where AIDS and government’s ruinous policies have caused the life expectancy to fall from 56 years in 1993 to 30 years in 2005, the government taxes foreign medicines at a rate of 22.5 percent.