Zimbabweans are not burning tollgates or storming tax offices, but a new 2025 Tax Perception Survey suggests that a silent tax revolt is already in motion, hidden in low compliance, rising resentment and a fragile social contract that now hangs on whether the state can prove it deserves every dollar it demands. Generated by the Zimbabwe Taxpayers Platform, ZITAP, and framed along the Afrobarometer 2021 tax module to enable trend analysis, the survey set out to listen to ordinary citizens in a season when government is promising reforms, digitisation and an upper middle income economy, yet still leans heavily on a narrow tax base in a wounded economy.
What emerges is a paradox that policymakers can no longer ignore, Zimbabweans broadly accept the idea of taxation, but they are increasingly unconvinced by the way it is being executed, accounted for and justified. At a normative level, most respondents agree that the state must levy taxes to fund public goods and services, echoing Afrobarometer’s earlier finding that citizens understand that modern states cannot run on goodwill alone. In principle, people accept that someone must pay for roads, hospitals, schools, courts and security.
Beneath that philosophical agreement lies a layered frustration that runs through the survey like an underground stream. Respondents complain of high tax rates and an excessive tax quantum weighed against depressed incomes and a punishing cost of living, they speak of a difficult and intimidating compliance environment that feels designed for punishment rather than partnership, and they point to an everyday reality in which just a few seem to comply consistently while others, especially those with power, connections or economic muscle, appear to glide around the rules. The result is a perception that the tax regime is not just heavy but uneven, and that the burden rests on the wrong shoulders.
ZITAP deliberately frames this discontent in the language of the social contract. In simple terms, the tax deal is supposed to be a negotiated relationship in which individuals and corporates voluntarily surrender part of their income to a central authority that in turn commits to manage public funds efficiently, transparently and in line with constitutional requirements. Chapter 17 of Zimbabwe’s Constitution is explicit about the principles of public financial management, the role of Parliament in oversight, the limits of state borrowing and the duties of all custodians of public resources.
Yet the survey respondents do not speak like citizens who feel protected by those clauses, they speak like investors whose trust has been diluted by years of Auditor General reports that expose leakages, irregularities and waste, with little visible consequence. They speak like stakeholders who watch complex entities moved into opaque structures by statutory instruments, and who hear more about patriotic discipline than about forensic recovery of lost revenue. In that context, non compliance takes on a more political and psychological hue, people are not simply trying to evade tax, they are quietly voting no confidence in the fiscal governance ecosystem.
One of the sharpest observations in the report is that Zimbabwe is trying to maintain big state ambitions on a low trust foundation. Citizens see the state inserting itself into productive sectors as a competitor rather than a regulator, sustaining a large administrative footprint, and repeatedly turning to new levies, transaction taxes and sin taxes as quick fixes for structural problems. The ZITAP position, drawn from the findings, is that the country’s tax problem is less about the creativity of revenue instruments and more about the size, behaviour and discipline of the state itself.
A leaner, more efficient government that withdraws from crowding out the private sector, trims waste and respects procurement rules would naturally lower its own appetite for revenue, allowing for fewer and lower taxes and for more meaningful tax free thresholds so that households and firms retain enough income to breathe, invest and formalise. Without that recalibration, adding more taxes in a low trust environment simply deepens informality and incentivises quiet rebellion.
The digital turn in tax administration provides another revealing fault line. On paper, the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority and the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion have embraced reform through the Tax and Revenue Management System, TaRMS, backed by support from local and international partners and aligned with the ease of doing business narrative. In theory, digitalisation should reduce human discretion, shorten queues and make compliance cheaper.
But the survey’s testimonies insist that digitalisation, as currently experienced, is necessary but not sufficient. Taxpayers want a system that behaves like a true twenty first century platform, an interface that is intuitive, always on, supported by artificial intelligence powered assistance, and benchmarked against regional models such as the South African Revenue Service. They speak of the need for a comprehensive mobile application that allows filing, queries and payments from any location and at any time, not a system that mirrors an eight to four bureaucracy in digital form.
They demand an online environment that does not crash under pressure, that recognises the fluid reality of globalised business and that treats small taxpayers with the same respect afforded to big corporates. In their view, a halfway digital state that still requires manual interventions, paper trails and physical visits is not a reform, it is an extension of the same old gatekeeping, only now dressed in code.
Transparency and accountability, the oxygen of any tax based social contract, also come under heavy scrutiny in the survey. ZITAP acknowledges that ZIMRA, the Ministry of Finance and the Office of the Auditor General produce reports that are available to the public and to Parliament. But the organisation argues that technical publication is not the same thing as lived transparency.
For the average taxpayer, what counts is whether they can see a believable chain between the taxes deducted from their payslip or transaction and the services delivered in their community, whether abuses flagged in audit reports result in recoveries, sanctions and systemic reform, and whether large strategic entities that sit on mineral, transport or aviation value are subjected to the same sunlight as smaller agencies.
It is within this frame that the report targets Statutory Instrument 156 of 2023, which placed several state linked enterprises under the Mutapa Investment Fund and in effect created a shielded zone in which commercial activities can evade the routine scrutiny applied to other organs of the state. For a citizenry already sceptical about leakages, the combination of big money, national assets and limited oversight feels like an invitation to distrust. ZITAP’s call for the repeal of Statutory Instrument 156 of 2023, for a stronger Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe and for faster, annual audits is not just a governance demand, it is an attempt to re anchor taxation in a culture where no public dollar is beyond question.
The survey also surfaces a softer but important dimension, the role of tax literacy and constitutional consciousness in shaping attitudes. In an economy dominated by a youthful and highly informal population, many citizens have never encountered systematic civic education about how public finance works or why taxes exist beyond the language of force. Some of the negative perceptions captured in the survey therefore stem not from criminal intent, but from ignorance, confusion and the absence of a narrative that links the obligation to pay tax with the right to demand accountability.
ZITAP argues that short lived campaigns and occasional booths at trade fairs are inadequate. Instead, it suggests a continuous tax education infrastructure that leverages artificial intelligence enabled platforms, chatbots and digital content that does not sleep, meeting citizens on their phones, in their languages and at their own pace. In this vision, technology is not just a back office tool for revenue collection, it becomes a front line medium for rebuilding trust, humanising institutions and teaching the Constitution in practical terms.
There is also a methodological humility in the report that strengthens rather than weakens its punch. ZITAP is upfront that time and resources constrained the survey’s reach, but it deliberately aligned its framework with Afrobarometer to allow comparisons over time and to situate its findings in a wider African conversation about taxation, democracy and accountability. That choice turns the document into more than a one off snapshot, it becomes an early warning system.
And the warning is blunt, if government interprets citizen fatigue as mere grumbling and responds with more taxes, more statutory instruments and more opacity, it will accelerate a quiet exodus from the formal tax net and further erode the moral authority of the state to ask for sacrifice. By contrast, if policymakers treat the report as a feedback loop from the people of Zimbabwe, they have an opening to renegotiate the fiscal social contract on more honest and sustainable terms.
They could start by simplifying and lowering taxes while broadening the base through trust, not terror, by visibly acting on Auditor General findings, by subjecting all public enterprises, including those under Mutapa, to robust oversight, and by turning TaRMS and related platforms into genuinely user centric, twenty four hour digital ecosystems.
The 2025 Tax Perception Survey ultimately reads less like a technical memo and more like a mirror. It reflects a country where citizens still believe in the logic of pooling resources for the common good, but are increasingly unwilling to pour those resources into a bucket they suspect is leaking. It reminds Zimbabwe’s political and fiscal managers that tax is not just a line item on a budget, it is a barometer of how citizens judge the state’s integrity, competence and respect for its own Constitution. And it hints at a simple and uncomfortable truth, the real tax revolt is not on the streets, it is in the quiet calculations of millions deciding, every day, whether the current tax deal is still worth honouring.
