Taxpaying as a virtue

Sierra Leone usually struggles to collect taxes, even from the minority of the population that can genuinely afford to pay.

Recently, however, at least some of the city's poorest residents are paying their local tax with pride, as documented in this BBC story.

The untold story in that piece is the enthusiastic collection practices by the local council, which has resulted in the shuttering of many small shops and kiosks for failure to pay back taxes. Many of those shopkeepers walk a very fine line between survival and starvation, and would probably express much less pleasure with the new tax collection regime.