Repeal outdated Car radio tax, rethink it in view of technological advancement
By Prof Jonathan Moyo
It is indeed a fact Cde Secretary that the car radio licence fee was introduced with the enactment of the Broadcasting Services Act in 2001; the rationale then being that the licence target was any receiver, in a car, that accesses the frequency bands of the radio spectrum.
Mere possession of the receiver was enough to attract a licence fee.
However, the collection of the fee was difficult ab initio: in consultations during the drafting stages, ZRP were not interested in policing the fee and CVR were not interested in collecting it; so the responsibility for both remained with ZBC, and the high overheads, administrative inefficiencies and corruption rendered the arrangement worthless.
The new collection arrangement is a major breakthrough in its efficiency, but it has come almost a quarter of a century too late since the introduction of the car radio licence fee in 2001.
Basically, the revolution in digital technologies has outdated car radio licences, which is why they have been vacated worldwide.
In this connection, the Second Republic had, and still has, an opportunity to repeal the 2001 car radio fee as an outdated, no longer necessary, inconvenient, now unreasonable, and unfair tax burden.
But this, of course, does not mean that the need for a single or unified broadcasting licence fee should be retired or abolished. Far from it.
As good practice from around the world shows, the broadcasting licence fee remains necessary to support public broadcasting. The beneficiaries of a broadcasting licence fee should always be public broadcasters; not private broadcasters, who, in fact, need to be obligated to contribute to public broadcasting as part of their licence conditions.
The challenge for a broadcasting licence fee nowadays is how to structure it, perhaps as a tax, taking into account the rapid and massive technological and social transformation taking place.
All told, and acknowledging its good policy intentions, it would be in both the public and national interest to pause the implementation of the car radio licence in order not only to rethink it; but to also review the very idea of a radio and television licence in a digital world; with a view to coming up with a more suitable and mordenised, user friendly, alternative model of a single and comprehensive broadcasting licence fee model!
