Revenue mobilisation or repression? Taxing online activities in Africa

IConcerns are increasing over the power multinational platform companies like Meta or X Corp. (formerly Twitter) wield while remaining untaxed in the countries where they generate value from data, including across the African continent. At the same time many African countries struggle to raise revenue. In this context, attempts to levy taxes on citizens’ online activities for example by taxing the use of social media have been criticised for infringing on human rights. This article proposes an overview of the different types of taxes targeting online activities adopted across the African continent. It then explores the drivers of the adoption of such taxes, focusing particularly on the political and economic aspects potentially leading to the adoption of taxes on the use of social media, and internet. Based on the comparison of a diverse set of cases consisting of Benin, Uganda, Rwanda and Nigeria, the article sketches a theory of taxation of online activities. It finds that both political and economic incentives play a role in the adoption of taxes on the use of social media and on the use of internet, depending on whether states are more interested in restricting the use of such services to limit opposition and in raising revenue, or whether their interest lie in the potential of internet for economic development and/or for population surveillance. With these findings, the article highlights the importance of considering the economic and political aspects of digital sector taxation concomitantly, both for researchers investigating taxation of online activities and for practitioners designing or evaluating tax policies.