The payment of taxes under the land policy is one of the mechanisms designed to assist with the generation of revenue from the exploitation of natural resources. A part of this revenue is consigned to the district administrations and is an important potential contribution to the building of capacity at this level. The policy regarding decentralisation recognised that the process would have little impact if the administrations were not authorised to use their own revenues.
In addition the land taxes serve to ensure that only serious investors, with the financial standing to develop land appropriately so that it contributes to the general socio-economic development of the country, are holders of exclusive land use rights. Without annual taxation, land speculation remains a possibility.
The extremely low rate of payment of these taxes to date, if allowed to continue, will therefore jeopardise the ability of the district administrations to develop capacity and admit the possibility of speculators in land sitting on large parcels of valuable resources and awaiting the opportunity to capitalise on these. Although the SPGC are legally competent to collect the land taxes, the Department of Finances remains responsible for the application of sanctions in the event of non-payment. A recommendation from the PROAGRI Joint Land Mission was the creation of a land tax unit within the SPGC structures. Recently SPGC in ZambР№zia established such a unit. The extent of the non-payment that this unit will have to deal with is enormous (3,564,416,459 metecais, approximately equivalent to US $150,000) and payment rates to date have been extremely low (375,002,198 metecais, US $15,625).
There has also been very little discussion of the eventual consignment of these tax revenues, beyond the initial legislative stipulation that the proportions paid to central state coffers, to DINAGECA, to the SPGC and to the local district administrations should be 40%, 24%, 24% and 12% respectively. There is a range of possibilities for these revenues, many of which involve assistance to realising the poverty alleviation objectives of the law. It could be possible, for example, to allocate a certain percentage of this income to cover the transaction costs that the state would necessarily incur in a community delimitation process, effectively removing this element of the costs from the community.
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