Originally, I couldn’t for the life of me, understand why Zuma was so keen to disclose his tax affairs and why the Public Protector, who we all know is a Zuma stooge, went after his tax affairs with such gusto, especially when there was a persistent perception that Zuma’s tax affairs were not in order.
Then I heard the rumour that it was Pravin Gordan himself, who served as the Commissioner of SARS until 2009, who pardoned Zuma back in the day when his tax compliance was first questioned and when they were still big buddies. Apparently, or so the rumour goes, this investigation by Madam Mkwebane is not so much to investigate Zuma, but rather to try to dig up dirt on Gordan, hence Zuma’s support for her application for disclosure. I don’t know if this is true, but then again, nothing surprizes me anymore in this gangster’s paradise formerly know as SA….
For a man who clearly struggle with numbers (one million, six hundred, two hundred, eish), I highly doubt his tax matters will shed any light on on the matter.
I was hoping that it would teeter over the edge.
I suppose the desperation of the ANC to get more money through it is keeping it on life support.
Another point is that if large energy users build their own, they will buy less from Eskom, removing their reliable purchases and payments from the system. Eskom will be left with municipalities and Soweto as non paying users.
Or you have a few employers in your gig, but since you don’t turn up, the employer who always pays you the most and always on time has replaced you, and now you are left with a batch of unreliable employers.
Surely you’re being facetious.
Last thing the bank sector needs is to lose the goodwill of ratings agents. tax payers. shareholders and clients with any type of reckless lending to SOEs! In fact. if clients are sufficiently alarmed should the banks finance any further ANC ideologies that increase taxes, clients can always work together to achieve a run on any particular bank….
Rather concentrate on reducing costs.
Follow who?
The colonialists started SAA, The Apartheid Regime perfected it and the ANC destroyed it. – Long live the ANC !!!!!!!!
I don’t where these two are visiting Wits from (a Fellow and a Professor), but if you know South Africa, it’s people and their (often impaired) way of thinking, of arguing around and away from the real, systemic problems and how they tend to (and prefer to) take take illogical short-cut solutions, then you would know that this article will fall on death ears.
In SA, when your car breaks down – no problem if you are a comrade – you take time off to sort out this disastrous unexpected trouble, and the government will continue to pay you in full and employ a consultant at a higher rate than yours to supposedly do your job in your absence. Don’t worry comrade.
Here is a more correct car analogy:
You overpaid for a clunker using debt because your niece got a kick-back from the salesman.
You could pay 60c per km for a smart car (buying renewable energy is vastly different from buying renewable farms) to take the kids to school while you and the wife share the clunker to work, but elect to pay Uber R3.80km for a diesel bus to school. Your niece gets commission from the bus company.
To top it all, you never take the shortest route and keep on changing where you want to go. That, and you insist that all your staff and family go on all trips.
To make sure you get to where you might go, you also ban all other road users from being on the road four hours per day.
What would be the point of a bailout? It seems SAA would just burn through the cash pretty quick and we’d face the exact same issue again, just with 2bn more lost.
And just perhaps the reason for the decrease is increased renewable energy in India. Coal is on a slippery slope.
Plan the transition now!
“And things are likely to get worse before they get better“ says the article
Things can only get better if:
Government downsizes
Municipalities downsize (why do we amongst other things need Mayors on a payroll)
The looters must go to prison in so doing Government is hiving the assurance that the Zondo Commission isn’t a smoke screen
SOE’s need to downsize
SOE’s need to bring back the skill they got rid of due to BEE
Scrap BEE. Make South Africa a home for all
Incentivize and look after small business
In so doing employment will rise, so to the tax base
Find ways to increase the tax base. 3 million tax payers from a population of 55 million contributing 50% of Government revenue isn’t sustainable
Scrap the idea of an NHI and come up with something more sustainable
Appoint me as Minister of “regruk”
Only then can we say ““And things are likely to get worse before they get better“
Mothball SAA, who needs it, serves no purpose. Cities in SA have no potable water, infrastructure collapsed, governance dysfunctional, municipalities corrupt, ad infinitum, what’s the common denominator???
Conversely, I still have my FULL TRUST in the state….
….i.e. in its ability to slowly transform SA into a 3rd world country.
I fully trust the ANC to achieve long-term economic decline (…and boy, have they ‘delivered’ to date!)
OK. Now what? The officials are still there, getting paid.
In 2014 nothing happened, nothing stayed fixed. This coming election they will still vote ANC.
Nothing will get fixed or improve.
In 2002 we do not have the de industrialisation THROUGH BEE and rampant corruption through theANC that we have now.
Well, this judgement confirms what we have been saying all along – the average voter should be protected against his own destructive and deadly mindset. Democracy enables the majority to turn their environment into a representation of their mindset. When the taps run dry, sewage run down the streets, hospitals and clinics fall apart and children drown in pit toilets, then this mindset is toxic. Democracy is like a loaded shotgun, destructive in the wrong hands.
The problem is, no matter how many judgements we have, the court cannot change the mindset of people. The court can only insert a “trip switch” or “circuit breaker” between the intellectual capacity of the “collective” and the resulting reality of failed municipalities. This circuit breaker is privatisation. The means of production, or the means for service delivery, in this instance, should not be in the hands of the “people”, but rather in the hands of individuals who can deliver those services. We need accountability and reciprocity to clean the streets, and to get the water running in the taps.
The current system is unsustainable and it will kill more people until free enterprise and capitalism come to the rescue.
Those were good times.
I can recall buying Anglo at R120.00 per share somewhere around 2002/2003 and sold it somewhere in 2005 at R518.00. Only two or three years later.
Important to note that 15 years later it has not recovered to that level.
Somehow I dont have the same enthusiasm to invest locally this time.
The unprofitable routes is but a small part of the problem. Inflated contracts and tenders, scheming of the top, inflated work force, BEE suppliers. All these things have caused the demise of SAA.
It is easy to cut routes, it is less easy to tackle the other many problems. It seems as if ‘they’ do not want to tackle these other problems?
I propose a boycott of SAA by all patriotic South Africans so that this terminally ill dinosaur can finally be laid to rest. With a bit of luck, the last boeing can fall from the sky and hit traffic cops hiding under a tree outside Beaufort West, thereby not only taking out the traffic cops but also the ANC politicians on board. Jackpot.
Million what? Pound, Dollar, Rand? We are all rand millionaires. With 1 million rand one can’t even think about retirement.
But the fact is one must invest some money. So aiming for a million rand is good. Very good.
They run the country like they run a state funeral. The best-qualified among them, the generals with the clanking yellow medals of the colonialist, all dressed up in the uniform of the colonialist, amateurishly imitating the rituals of the colonialist, faking the competence and readiness of the colonialist, producing only false pretence and incompetence, to the extent that it is excruciatingly embarrassing, not for the laughing spectators, but for themselves and the for State they represent.
They honour their heroes with a farcical state funeral, where generals walk into each other in total confusion. This is typical of the ANC – One simple command goes out, then parties move in opposite directions, dazed and confused, querying the command and discussing the actual meaning of the command. Afterwards, after failed attempts of rationalisation and obfuscation, they produce a lame excuse for the inexcusable by blaming it on colonialism.
This is the Government of the Republic of South Africa. The job-losses are the casualties of this disastrously inept and farcical imitation of governance. By employing unproductive people at SOE’s, they are even imitating job-creation. Fake it until you make it.
In addition our beloved president mentioned earlier this week that the ANC will no longer deploy unqualified people to SOE’s.
It means they have been doing this for 26 years now.
How many unqualified people have been employed during the 26 years at SAA?
He never mentioned that there are plans to resolve this.
So how do you rescue SAA that has been deliberately invested with unqualified people by the ANC?
Anybody that believe it is possible needs to think again.
One must give these government people some credit, they have a wonderful way with words. They can talk the whole day and say nothing meaningful. And the talk is very very impressive.
Just close SAA down. South Africa does not need SAA.
Why must we have a national airline? the USA does not.
Believe it or not, but the recent strength of the rand is due to ANC incompetence. We are not competitive in this global environment of competitive devaluation. We are losing the “currency war” and we measure the casualties in the form of declining tax recenue and rising unemployment.
We use high rates of interest to bribe foreigners to buy our bonds, to lend to the bankrupt Luthuli House in other words. We haven’t got any ammo left over to fight the currency war. Our socualist policies turned us into the global dumpsite for unemployment and social decay.
At last some sense is prevailing. We need to employ business specific experienced professionals in the SOE’s which are capable of being turned around. Some however must just be liquidated, period.
Of course they will appeal. You are taking away their gravy.
They have destroyed Grahamstown and Port Alfred.
The author fails to address another societal behaviour issue: Why does someone who earns a domestic worker income have four children.