ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula reckons South Africans should thank SA Revenue Service commissioner Edward Kieswetter for a job well done by “kissing” him (special exemption for e-filers, I hope). There’s two sides to every romance though, and if anyone deserves a kissing it’s South Africa’s hard-bitten taxpayers, more mauled than kissed.
Never before have so few handed over so much for so little in return.
As the wintry chill of tax season blows in again, Mbalula may rub his hands in glee at the bulging fiscal couch, with a whopping net R1,686.7bn of other people’s money stuffed into it in the 2022/23 tax year and more on the way this year. Taxpayers must wonder where it all goes and that is the other million-dollar question. But every love affair, like every couch, has its secrets.
To help keep track of the flow of stolen and abused money we have an auditor-general’s office that every year compiles long studies of where it all went wrong in the year before. Unlike Kieswetter, the auditor-general doesn’t get a kiss. On the contrary, one hears of their travelling bean counters being held hostage in offices in broken towns until they get their sums right.
The annual auditor-general report is an expensive encore to another successful year of looting and misspending, yet it is a necessary bureaucratic fixture in any state that claims not yet to have failed. It grabs a few headlines and is quickly forgotten, becoming mere background music to the merry hum of “shrinkage”.
In 2015, for example, late auditor-general Kimi Makwetu signed off on R46bn in irregular state expenditure, an increase of 84% on the year before. About this he said: “If you don’t have consequences for wrongdoing, it conspires to create an environment open to abuse and looting.” And that’s about as delicately as it could be stated.
Almost 10 years later, just such an environment, “open to abuse and looting”, was brought to mind by Mbalula in his recent interview, when he reminisced about the Scorpions, the FBI-type unit disbanded with unusual efficiency after the Polokwane conference that elevated Jacob Zuma to the presidency, ensuring he would never have to ask for help for a car wash again.
With the Scorpions gone, the Zuma ANC could get down to the business it came to know best, namely lightening the public purse, relieving the burdened fiscus.
You have to love this special quality of the ANC, to be all things to all people, all the time. The Scorpions earned the wrath of the spending party (sorry, ruling party) because they were too dramatic in their style, embarrassing ANC worthies with their dawn swoops and attendant contingent of reporters and TV crews. A question of dignity. And of course, they were going after Zuma.
With the Scorpions gone, the Zuma ANC could get down to the business it came to know best, namely lightening the public purse, relieving the burdened fiscus. With Tom Moyane (kisses for him then but not any more) in the Sars hot seat, dismantling the very units that had given it teeth, it was open season for a festival of illicit eating. State capture perfected the fine art of looting.
Because our ruling-spending party thinks capitalism when it collects taxes but socialism when it spends them, much of our tax money is wasted on useless schemes and a bloated public service that delivers little benefit for those who need it most. State hospitals are a mess, schools churn out thousands of kids every year who battle to read for meaning and our police force is a joke. You can kiss much of our public money goodbye.
While the rest of the population reels under the effects of inflation, soaring crime and crumbling public services, Mbalula and fellow cabinet members know of no shortages. We are told belt-tightening is being followed and yet every day we read of new excesses and luxuries for ministers, their families and the connected.
Our efforts in this regard have not gone unnoticed. Just this week, the International Monetary Fund again warned about the bleakness of South Africa’s outlook, its message confirming the adage that democracies spend themselves to death. Especially when they’re desperate. Too late for the “Father Christmas” warnings.
Tax and death are life’s two certainties, so regardless of whether one regards tax as state-sanctioned theft, which I incontrovertibly do, you have to pay it. We all do, every time we buy anything except if it’s on the VAT-exempt list, mostly cabbage.
What annoys though is paying tax to subsidise a standard of living for our ruling elite that provides all the trappings of colonial-style royalty, and an apparent licence to pontificate to we who hardly could be bothered to listen about inequality and poverty.
Tell us something new. One might have thought a movement that espouses egalitarian and redistributionist ideals would go out of its way to promote modesty in public life. As it once promised to do.
Mbalula was previously minister of transport, and the fact that black workers now have to pay taxi fare to get to work when we had a perfectly serviceable railway system to start with, must have something to do with him. The man getting the ANC back on track, and in whose department the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) is located, presided over the dismantling of an entire railway system. Shrug.
Recently, Prasa chair Leonard Ramatlakane was “let go” after it was found he was living mahala in a Prasa luxury house while his own house was being refurbished, a fact we became aware of through the reporting of the Sunday Times, and not any diligence of the transport ministry. No-one had seen much wrong with it before.
Ramatlakane is now headed for the hills, not on a Prasa train obviously, and it will be interesting to see at what station he pitches up at next.
Here’s a more recent insight into taxpayer-funded largesse, when it comes to other people’s money. From KwaZulu-Natal a report that state officials suspended for irregularities in a R4.9m deal to supply poor people with blankets during the Covid lockdown scored an incredible R14.6m for staying at home while they were suspended.
Twelve officials and three senior managers now face disciplinary hearings.
As is customary in these cases, managers often resign to avoid a disciplinary process. One of them did just that, scoring a cool R40,420 for leave days.
If the ANC put half as much effort into governing as it seems to spend on milking the system for itself and those within the lucky circle of beneficiaries we’d all be better off. More inclined to kissing the taxman. As of now though, can we honestly say we’re getting enough bang from our Mbaks?
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