By Joas Kaijage
The Citizen Correspondent
Bukoba. Authorities in Bukoba Municipality say they  will not grant property tax exemptions for houses belonging to elderly people unless the owners use them for residential purposes and not renting them on commercial basis.Bukoba Municipality executive director Mr Khamis Kaputa, told a delegation of elderly people recently that owners of houses which are run as income-generating sources should adhere to existing taxation regimes.

The delegation,  comprising represetatives from Mwanza, Arusha, Kigoma, Ruvuma and Kagera regions,  expressed  concerns over  the tax, when they paid  a courtesy call on the Bukoba Municipal director’s office recently.

The courtesy call was part of  a broader initiative  to secure  social welfare promotion for elderly people.  One of the issues on which they laid emphasis  was  implementation of the National Elderly People’s  Policy.The delegation lamented that the directives contained in the 2003  policy, and those of the National Strategy for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction, MKUKUTA,  were yet to be enforced.

 They noted that although elderly people’s  representatives  were supposed to be involved in decision making processes, this was rarely done.The former Kagera regional chairperson of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Mr Pius Ngeze,  said during the elderly people’s three-day forum that the government has never had  a feasible programme for catering for the interests of senior citizens in the past 50 years of independence.

“It is true that we have the National Elderly People’s Policy but this is not enough because it has not been ratified into law which could be a more appropriate means of advocating  the interests of elderly  people’s welfare,” the former CCM regional chairman pointed out.

Mr Ngeze, 68, said the policy in question could not guarantee promotion of their welfare  because it was simply  a guideline that deomnstrated the government’s goodwill.

He said it was high time the government put in place clear enforceable mechanisms to enhance the livelihood of the country’s  senior citizens, who were the architects of the nation’s prevailing social and economic development.

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