Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic insights on the import business of Somali business-men in Kenya, the paper argues that we need to understand ‘the time of the goods’ and its relation to tax, transit, and profit in order to unpack the moral dimension of the tax-exemption.

Paper long abstract:

Much ethnographic literature on economic practices deals with the relation between and transgressions of the formal and the informal divide. While this is also relevant when studying taxation and attitudes toward taxation, ethnographic evidence from Somali businessmen in Nairobi's Eastleigh neighborhood point to a temporal dimension. An central aspect of their import and trade with goods concerns keeping the goods moving; port authorities, border controls, and weighbridges not only represent the state, and the state's revenue authorities, more importantly they represent an interruption of time and of the flow of goods.

The paper shows that the effort put into securing quick or free passage through these state sanctioned transit and revenue post (often through bribes and coercion), concerns the control and management of time as much as concerns immorality and disobedience against the state. Analytically, the paper draws on Roitman's ideas of morality in relation to cross-border smuggling (2005). The temporal aspect is inspired by Guyer's encouragement to take the temporality in the gaps between formal and informal serious in order to understand the relation between time and power (2014). The paper examines how time is sanctioned, what kinds of profits are made, and what kind of delays matter? The paper argues that we need to understand 'the time of the goods' and its relation to tax, transit, and profit in order to unpack the moral dimension of the tax-exemption involved in the import and trade of Somali business-men.