You can accuse Malusi Gigaba of a lot of things but cowardly he is not. When he presented Jacob Zuma’s final budget this week, it took serious chutzpah to speak – with a straight face and without blushing – about “sin tax”.
I’m talking about the astonishing nerve of Minister Gigaba to use that moralistic little phrase given the decade we’ve just been through.
To stand up and casually imply that cigarettes and booze are sins, when your government has spent the last 10 years systematically stealing from the poor, well, that’s just special.
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