Presumably, on 12 March, the new date set for the Budget Speech, we will officially find out who won in the battle of wills between the ideologically obsessed transformers and the desperately hopeful reformers.
Will it be those who wish to see this country’s Budget bringing in reforms and throwing off the ties that hold down growth? Or those who wish to continue to extract from the budget as many golden eggs as possible before they or the goose die?
What we, the beleaguered and despairing citizens of this declining country want from this budget right now is the feeling that we’ve turned the corner and are on an upward trajectory. We need the Government of National Unity to give us a sign that compromise, to the benefit of the country, is possible on all sides.
In the meantime, while we wait for that signal, I’d like to take you back to February 19th when the Finance Minister was expected to present his Budget Speech in Parliament, but didn’t.
While I was watching and waiting, my Google feed presented me with the headline: “Victoria and David Beckham’s toaster blends classic style with modern performance – it’s an iconic kitchen essential”.
There was something bizarrely alluring about this ridiculously over-the-top declaration concerning a small kitchen appliance owned by two very wealthy celebrities.
So, even though I continued watching the Dome parliament in Cape Town, where there was growing consternation among the waiting MPs and live broadcasters at the unprecedented, and as yet unexplained, delay in the Budget speech, I clicked through to the House and Gardens article.
(What can I say to excuse this flibbertigibbet behaviour? I’m female. I have ADHD, I kind of knew, or hoped I knew what was causing the holdup to the Dome proceedings?)
I wanted to know what made a toaster iconic.
It seems the writer of the article thinks it is the brand and model. But the killer fact, I think, is that Posh and Becks’ toaster cost 380 US dollars – around R7000 South African rands.
For people who fall into the tax brackets below the those who are earning two million and upwards The people who pay the most tax in South Africa – BusinessTech, particularly the middle classes and working classes increasingly being squeezed by the depressed economic situation, the loss of jobs and the majority party’s profligate tendencies in pursuit of transformation, this is a wanton, ridiculous and silly amount of money to pay for a toaster, even an iconic one.
My curiosity concerning the toaster was assuaged. But still this inconsequential article swirled around my head like an annoying earworm. Then I realised. Of course, it was an analogy of sorts, waiting to debut.
The ANC’s political elite, busy trying to dictate what the first budget for this GNU should contain, mostly falls within the R2 million-and-upwards super-wealthy tax brackets and, like so many celebrities and elites elsewhere, has little grasp of life lower down the tax-bracket hierarchy.
It is also far too fond of designer labels, shiny things and, as speeches by Cyril Ramaphosa and Panyaza Lesufi demonstrate, high-end projects such as smart cities, high-end technology, brand new airports, an extension of the Gautrain to townships, and a multi-billion-rand Black Industrialists scheme.
The taxpayers in the reality zone, as well as the non-tax-paying, non-working majority, know the country is going to the dogs in most places and by most metrics, and the decline needs to be arrested and the problems fixed, But we don’t want glamorous costly big pie-in-the-sky projects. We want, as our grandmothers would have it “to fit our coat to our cloth’.
What we want right now is the equivalent of a common-or-garden toaster. Something that works, is reliable, and that the country or the city can afford. (For the toaster cognoscenti among you, that would be a common-or-garden Russell Hobbs or Sunbeam, rather than a SMEG, Alessi, Cuisinart or even the Beckhams’ Dualit.)
If we’re looking for an ‘iconic essential’, I’d say it should be the Budget that Treasury is reworking with the GNU cabinet, and that we are waiting on.
The Budget postponement last month was unprecedented in our history.
But I am holding out hope it will be seen by historians in future as simply the precursor to an even more significant historic event – a budget speech in which the African National Congress concedes that race-based policies are not doing the country any good, and that cuts must be made to wasteful expenditure. A budget which demonstrates that the GNU cabinet has listened to the input of free marketeers, assorted capitalists and supporters of small government and that completely refrains from punishing the country’s hapless taxpayers with any more taxes.
Such a budget would be heroic, historic and iconic, and herald South Africa’s own reset – to a sufficient-consensus government and a growing economy.
I realize, however, that I was similarly hopeful after the triumph of the ‘yes’ vote in the 1992 Referendum.
That initiated the reset to a democratic South Africa. But it hasn’t quite turned out as well as it could have done, what with the ANC’s bogarting of power and slavish devotion to socialism.
Still, hope springs eternal….
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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