Month: June 2026

Tax Bill Risks Turning Every Citizen into a Suspect

Reading some of Angola’s recent legislation can leave one wondering whether the problem lies with the reader, the drafter or a lawmaker legislating for a country that exists only on paper. Article 45(2) of the proposed Personal Income Tax Code, known by its Portuguese acronym IRPS, states: “Financial institutions must also submit to the Tax Administration, by January 31 and through the electronic transmission of data, information concerning receipts credited to clients during the previous financial year.” The language may sound merely bureaucratic. Its implications are anything but. The provision would require banks to report every amount received on behalf of every client during the previous year. In effect, every sum entering a depositor’s account would be transmitted to the tax authorities — even a small gift from a grandmother to pay for biscuits. This is a striking example of how lawmakers, whether under pressure from international institutions or driven […]

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Angola’s Garbage Tax, Imported Folly

A Disguised Tax There is also an institutional dimension that makes the measure still more problematic. Angola’s Constitution provides for local authorities as territorial bodies organised at municipal level and endowed with representative organs of their own. The municipal assembly is to be elected by universal, free, direct, secret and periodic suffrage, while the head of the most-voted list becomes the president of the local executive.   Yet Angola still has no functioning elected local authorities and has never held municipal elections. The result is a clear democratic distortion: a levy is being raised for municipal purposes, but municipalities remain run by structures dependent on the central executive rather than by locally elected bodies accountable to residents. Instead of strengthening the local autonomy envisaged by the Constitution, the garbage levy would feed municipal administrations that do not derive their authority from the direct will of the citizens being asked to […]

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