THE media and institutions of higher learning in the United States are debating the politicisation of higher education and whether university endowments should now be taxed.

We may not currently have endowments of the kind in the country, but there are parallels – for instance, when a religious institution builds a university that might also mean having provisions for endowment funds.

It might mean some presumed philanthropists identifying with particular institutions or denominations and willingly deciding to part with part of their wealth to fund the new institution as a legacy to themselves. Many rich people are known to have left portions of their wealth to charities.

One reason we have few endowment funds in the proper sense of the term is that the very idea of an endowment attracts taxation.

It involves the idea that someone has immense amounts of extra cash, this alongside a culture where the government may elect to vie with beneficiaries as to who should take extra the cash left by an individual.

When there is a disaster, the preference might be that those touched by the situation should not direct contributions to families of their community organisation, or their known agents, but to administrative authorities.

This has largely to do with an idea of patriotism – to direct money to the state ostensibly so as to improve education, etc., instead of encouraging individuals to finance institutions of their choice, while the funds so directed would be exempted from tax.

As the country gradually starts to have a wide range of millionaires or billionaires, this insistence on directing funds to public coffers redirects money that could benefit education at the community level to be wasted by inheritance.

Money left to younger people is spent more rapidly than would apply under the original savers, who could have had what they needed to lead modestly ‘upper’ lives. Communities would then have had a presumably fairer share via leaving assets to a university, a school, a hospital, etc.

It is hard to say what the current format for mobilising education funds serves, unless one assumes that those delivering funds to the Tanzania Education Fund do so purely for charitable purposes and have no demands upon the government.

We all have one or other need in life where a shift in government policy or regulation would be favourable, and at times it is a matter of being on the line with a particular minister to secure a regulatory flagging off of a specific project.

Ruling out this sort of design in whatever outlook lone may have in mind could be complicated, as it indeed has attracted substantial funding in the past decade.

An endowment act would meanwhile perhaps favour communities more directly at the expense of state or other authorities or agencies, in the process possibly attracting greater interest and proving more beneficial – perhaps.