While most people are still clamouring Mthuli Ncube to get rid of his signature 2% tax, we knew that was never going to happen from early indications of what was in the budget. The government is so in love with the tax and the supposed surpluses it is bringing in to let it go anytime soon. That tax is here to stay.

Instead in his latest budget presentation, the Finance Minister gave us the next best thing. He has again raised the minimum threshold for transactions upon which the tax is applied to $100.

I propose to review the Tax-Free Threshold from the current ZWL$20 to
ZWL$100 and the maximum tax payable per transaction by corporates from the current ZWL$15 000 to ZWL$25 000 for transactions with values exceeding ZWL$1 250 000.

This essentially means that if you perform transactions below $100 those transactions will now be exempted from the tax. It will be interesting to see how mobile money operators react to this, they had hiked transaction fees citing the tax now will they reduce the fees on affected transactions?