CHAPTER SIX: Literacy in Bweyale 6.1 Introduction
6.4 Livelihood and community literacy practices
6.4.1 Common literacy practices in livelihood activities
6.4.1.2 Acquiring trading and road licenses
The second common area of literacy use in livelihood activities relates to fulfilling government tax obligations. Operators of shops, restaurants, bars, lodges, Bodaboda cycles, and any other commercial enterprise are required by law to pay for a trading or road licence. This payment is made to the Local Government or the Uganda Revenue Authority, which issues the trading and road licences with documents authorising them to operate their businesses, or vehicles for a specified period. Literacy is very centrally involved in this process. In this section, I present and discuss some examples of how people who are involved use reading and writing in this process, that is, the literacy practices related to acquiring a trading or road licence.
Paying for a trading licence
In paying for trading licences, the traders have limited involvement with the actual coding and decoding of texts because it is the local government officials who come to the trading centre, moving from shop to shop collecting taxes from the shopkeepers and issuing them with trading licences, who do all the reading and writing related to tax collection. The traders are only expected to pay and confirm that the trading licence has been properly written in their names or the names of their businesses and to display the licences in a visible position in their shops. The local government bureaucrat does all the writing required in issuing trading licences to a trader, and the trader only confirms and hangs it up in his shop. This is similar to the findings of Malan (1996) in South Africa in relation to the writing done at the magistrate’s offices and on pension day.
The trading licence is a form with pre-written text in English, indicating what should be filled in in the different sections of the licence (see Figure 23 below).
Figure 23: A trading licence.
Paying for road licences
Like the trading licence, a road licence is a tax levied on all motor vehicles to allow them to be used for a specified period. It is the responsibility of the vehicle owners to pay for a road licence. Unlike the trading licences, the process of paying for road licences is more complex. It involves filling in an application form supplied by the Uganda Revenue Authority Office. This form has eight different sections requiring different responses from the person filling it in.
The first section of this form, at the top of the page, is the identity of the form given as,
“TR II form 2” and the name of the issuing authority, The Republic of Uganda. The person filling in the form has little to do with this section except recognising it. The second section requires personal information about the owner of the vehicle: names, district, county, town and Tax Identification Number, written only as “TIN” on the form.
The third section of the form relates to the road licence: duration, number of months and ending dates. The fourth section requires information about the vehicle for which the road licence is paid. The fifth is information about the insurance status of the vehicle. The sixth is a pre-printed declaration to be signed by the vehicle owner about alterations made on the vehicle, if any, during the year, and other documents to be attached to the form.
Section 7 and 8 are for official purposes.
Two sources of information: self and the motor vehicle registration book are used when filling in this form. Information required to fill in the first and the second sections comes from the owner of the vehicle. Information about the motor vehicle is in the vehicle registration book (a document containing the vehicle’s specifications. This document is issued by the Uganda Revenue Authority at the time of registering the vehicle for use in Uganda). The person paying the road licences must have this vehicle’s registration book, and the insurance certificate that are handed over to the revenue officer to verify and enter the duration of the road licences on it. When filling in the form, the vehicle information is transferred from the registration book to the application form. This is not a very simple process because it requires the ability to identify the different types of information from one source to be transferred to a particular section of the form. In addition to this
complexity, the forms are always written in English without any translation for those who are not able to understand English. Because of the complexity of the form, the revenue officers fill in the forms for their clients and some clients think that is the normal procedure when it is not. For example Ocan, with 11 years of education (Senior 4 in Uganda), who is literate and able to speak and read English, said that he is helped with his forms while at the revenue office. His question to me, “Do you fill the forms yourself?”
(Interview with Ocan conducted in Luo on Sunday the 9th July 2005) shows that he was not aware that the road licence form could be filled in by the person paying for the road licence. However, it is also possible that he could have not been to the revenue office, but was only trying to present himself as someone who owns a motorcycle, a very prestigious possession for a person like him who works as a Bodaboda rider.
Whatever the case, the literacy practices of filling in the road licence form are not easy.
For that reason, the revenue officers at Masindi Revenue Office do help some of their clients by filling in the forms for them (unrecorded interview and observation at Masindi District Revenue Office, Monday, 15th August 2005).
The basic skills required to deal with these forms are the ability to read the pre-printed instructions and to identify the information demanded in each section, filling it in and
confirming that the information filled in has been done correctly. This is similar to other form filling practices. To do this, both the person filling in the information and the person reading it should have a common understanding of the form. This common understanding helps them to come to a common interpretation of the information required in the form both ways. In other words, they should both belong to the same discourse practice.
The power relation in this process of filling in forms is based on the knowledge and authority the people involved with the form have about the form. The person with less knowledge is rendered illiterate in spite of their ability to read and write, like the case of Ocan the Bodaboda rider. Ocan is disempowered twice, firstly by his lack of knowledge about the discourse practices of the Uganda Revenue Office and maybe his lack of experience with form filling. Secondly, his position in relation to the Uganda Revenue Office is that of a taxpayer who must comply with the tax laws of the country. In his relationship with the institution of the Uganda Revenue Authority, his continued use of the motorcycle is dependant on his compliance with the requirement of the organisation.
He is therefore in a subordinate position in this literacy transaction (see Fawns & Ivanič, 2001). I have only used Ocan as an example but the same power relations also apply to those paying for trading licences.
However, the structures of many forms, and how information is filled in them, are similar to other forms. Therefore, a person with sufficient knowledge and general experience with filling in forms should be able to comprehend them quickly, that is to learn the specific discourse practices related to the particular forms and to fill in the form. Learning the discourse practice related to the form can come in the form of minimum assistance from a mediator, who can help with institution specific discourses.
Furthermore, there could be some idiosyncratic approaches to form filling depending on the individual’s experience with particular forms. For example, first timers may read a form carefully to make sense of its different parts before filling it in or confirming what is on the form, while more experienced people may just take a glance to confirm or fill in the vital information (see Fawns & Ivanič, 2001). These differences are not significant to make form filling and reading practices to be significantly different in different
institutions.
The findings presented in this section reveal that ways of using reading and writing, which are common to most livelihood activities, are those that relate to informing the public about the services available or being offered by each livelihood initiative. The second area relates to dealing with public institutions to meet National and Local
Government’s tax obligations. This shows that if the activities are similar across different livelihood activities, then the literacy practices related to those activities will also be similar. That is, the specific activities shape the literacy practices related to them.